Morbidity of birth asphyxia has been estimated to be 42 million disability-adjusted life years. The study sought to assess the impact of the use and completion of partograph during labour on reducing birth asphyxia at the St Anthony’s Hospital, Dzodze, in the Volta Region of Ghana. A retrospective study design using a quantitative approach was adopted for the study. A simple random sampling technique was used to select a total of 200 folders of labouring women who were admitted and delivered (...) at St Anthony’s Hospital, Dzodze, between 1st May 2015 and 30th April 2016. A structured checklist, which was developed by using labour and foetal monitoring parameters based on the standards of the World Health Organization partograph usage, was used to review all the 200 existing maternal records. The findings revealed that partographs were used by midwives at St Anthony’s Hospital with the majority of the maternal folders fully completed. The use and completion of partograph were found to be associated with less non-asphyxiated birth outcomes. Labours which were monitored with partograph were 4.29 times less likely to result in birth asphyxia [AOR 4.29 ], and those that were monitored with a completed partograph were 5.3 times less likely to result in birth asphyxia [AOR 5.31 ]. Midwives used partographs during labour at St Anthony’s Hospital. The use and completion of partograph were significantly associated with a reduced incidence of birth asphyxia at the hospital. Birth asphyxia could be reduced if partographs are used and completed by midwives during labour in all cases. (shrink)

Philosophers increasingly engage in practical work with other disciplines and the world at large. This volume draws together the lessons learned from this work--including philosophers' contributions to scientific research projects, consultations on matters of policy, and expertise provided to government agencies and non-profits--on how to effectively practice philosophy. Its 22 case studies are organized into five sections: I Collaboration and Communication II Policymaking and the Public Sphere III Fieldwork in the Academy IV Fieldwork in the Professions V Changing Philosophical Practice (...) Together, these essays provide a practical, how-to guide for doing philosophy in the field--how to find problems that can benefit from philosophical contributions, effectively collaborate with other professionals and community members, make fieldwork a positive part of a philosophical career, and anticipate and negotiate the sorts of unanticipated problems that crop up in direct public engagement. Key features: Gives specific advice on how to integrate philosophy with outside groups. Offers examples from working with the public and private sectors, community organizations, and academic groups. Provides lessons learned, often summarized at the end of chapters, for how to practice philosophy in the field. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations. In doing so, (...) our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the social life of methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualization; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilizing; and non-coherence. (shrink)

Complex environmental problems require well-researched policies that integrate knowledge from both the natural and social sciences. Epistemic differences can impede interdisciplinary collaboration, as shown by debates between conservation biologists and anthropologists who are working to preserve biological diversity and support economic development in central Africa. Disciplinary differences with regard to 1) facts, 2) rigor, 3) causal explanation, and 4) research goals reinforce each other, such that early decisions about how to define concepts or which methods to adopt may tilt research (...) design and data interpretation toward one discipline’s epistemological framework. If one of the contributing fields imposes a solution to an epistemic problem, this sets the stage for what I call disciplinary capture. Avoiding disciplinary capture requires clear communication between collaborators, but beyond this it also requires that collaborators craft research questions and innovate research designs which are different from the inherited epistemological frameworks of contributing disciplines. (shrink)

"-Barbara Ehrenreich, Mother Jones "This book represents the expression of a particular feminist perspective made all the more compelling by Keller's evident commitment to and understanding of science.

That Cicero as a young didactic poet embraced the traditions of Hellenistic hexameter poetry is well recognized. Those traditions encompass various forms of wordplay, one of which is the acrostic. Cicero's engagement with this tradition, in the form of an unusual Greek-Latin acrostic at Aratea 317–20, prompts inquiry regarding both the use of the acrostic technique as textual commentary and Cicero's lifelong concerns regarding translation.

In business and government, databases contain large quantities of digital transactional data (purchases made, services used, finances transferred, benefits received, licences acquired, borders crossed, tickets purchased). The data can be understood as ongoing and dynamic measurements of the activities and doings of people. In government, numerous database devices have been developed to connect such data across services to discover patterns and identify and evaluate the performance of individuals and populations. Under the UK’s New Labour government, the development of such devices (...) was part of a broader policy known as ‘joined-up thinking and government’. Analyses of this policy have typically understood joining up as an operation of adding together distributed data about subjects, which can then be used in the service of government surveillance, the database state or informational capitalism. But rather than such technical or managerialist analytics, I argue that topological analytics capture what these database devices enact and do: they materialize the ‘individuality’ of subjects in intensified, distributed and fluctuating ways and materialize and intensify a logic of what Deleuze describes as modulating controls. Through examples of UK New Labour social policy initiatives over the past decade, I argue that topological analytics can account for these as immanent rather than exceptional properties of database devices and, as such, part and parcel of a governmental logic and ontology of subjects. (shrink)

‘‘COGNITIVE ECOLOGY’’ is a fruitful model for Shakespearian studies, early modern literary and cultural history, and theatrical history more widely. Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments. Along with the anthropologist Edwin Hutchins,1 we use the term ‘‘cognitive ecology’’ to integrate a number of recent approaches to cultural cognition: we believe these approaches offer productive lines of engagement (...) with early modern literary and historical studies.2 The framework arises out of our work in extended mind and distributed cognition.3 The extended mind hypothesis arose from a post-connectionist philosophy of cognitive science. This approach was articulated in Andy Clark’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, and further developed by Susan Hurley and Mark Rowlands, among others.4 The distributed cognition approach arose independently, from work in cognitive anthropology, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), the sociology of education and work, and science studies. The principles of distributed cognition were articulated in Hutchins’s ethnography of navigation, Cogni- tion in the Wild,5 and developed by theorists such as David Kirsh and Lucy Suchman.6 These models share an anti-individualist approach to cognition. In all these views, mental activities spread or smear across the boundaries of skull and skin to include parts of the social and material world. In remembering, decision making, and acting, whether individually or in small groups, our complex and structured activities involve many distinctive dimensions: neural, affective, kines-. (shrink)

Much has been written about data politics in the last decade, which has generated myriad concepts such as ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘gig economy’, ‘quantified self’, ‘algorithmic governmentality’, ‘data colonialism’, ‘data subjects’ and ‘digital citizens’. Yet, it has been difficult to plot these concepts into an historical series to discern specific continuities and discontinuities since the origins of modern power in its three major forms: sovereign, disciplinary and regulatory. This article argues that the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 brought these three forms of (...) power into sharp relief but made particularly visible a fourth form of power that we name ‘sensory power’, which has been emerging since the 1980s. The article draws on early studies of power by Michel Foucault, subsequent studies on biopower and biopolitics that expanded on them, and studies in the past decade that focused on data produced from apps, devices and platforms. Yet, despite its ambition, the article is inevitably an outline of a much larger project. (shrink)

What do biologists want? If, unlike their counterparts in physics, biologists are generally wary of a grand, overarching theory, at what kinds of explanation do biologists aim? A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, "Making Sense of Life" draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.

Distinguishing intentional behavior from accidental behavior is a crucial component of social cognition and a major developmental achievement. It has often been assumed that developmental changes in intentional reasoning result from a gradual sophistication in the ability to discern intentions in action. We take issue with this notion, demonstrating that data from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology are more consistent with the hypothesis that it is instead a gradual sophistication in the ability to understand accidents that drives developmental change.

We argue that the wild release of genetically modified organisms can be justified as a way of preserving species and ecosystems. We look at the case of a genetically modified American chestnut that is currently undergoing regulatory review. Because American chestnuts are functionally extinct, a genetically modified replacement has significant conservation value. In addition, many of the arguments used against GMOs, especially GMO crops, do not hold for American chestnut trees. Finally, we show how GMOs such as the American chestnut (...) support a reorientation of conservation values away from restoration as it has historically been interpreted, and toward an alternative framework known as rewilding. (shrink)

In _Beyond Prejudice_, Evelyn B. Pluhar defends the view that any sentient conative being—one capable of caring about what happens to him or herself—is morally significant, a view that supports the moral status and rights of many nonhuman animals. Confronting traditional and contemporary philosophical arguments, she offers in clear and accessible fashion a thorough examination of theories of moral significance while decisively demonstrating the flaws in the arguments of those who would avoid attributing moral rights to nonhumans. Exposing the (...) traditional view—which restricts the moral realm to autonomous, fully fledged "persons"—as having horrific implications for the treatment of many humans, Pluhar goes on to argue positively that sentient individuals of any species are no less morally significant than the most automomous human. Her position provides the ultimate justification that is missing from previous defenses of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In the process of advancing her position, Pluhar discusses the implications of determining moral significance for children and "abnormal" humans as well as its relevance to population policies, the raising of animals for food or product testing, decisions on hunting and euthanasia, and the treatment of companion animals. In addition, the author scrutinizes recent assertions by environmental ethicists that all living things or that natural objects and ecosystems be considered highly morally significant. This powerful book of moral theory challenges all defenders of the moral status quo—which decrees that animals decidedly do not count—to reevaluate their convictions. (shrink)

Première rencontre avec Daniel Charles dans une 104 jaune en route vers les Treilles, le vaste domaine de la fondation Schlumberger qui égrène ses pins, ses oliviers et ses chênes rouvres sur trois collines du Haut-Var et où Jacqueline Ollier, directrice du centre Interspace, organisait un colloque sur le silence en juin 1984. J’y venais avec une image rythmique d’Éloges de Saint-John Perse : « – ô spondée du silence étiré sur ses longues! » et une métaphore croisée d’Anabase : (...) « je sais la... (shrink)

Il s’agit d’étudier dans ce volume non pas juste une classe de mots, mais une fonction, qui a fait l’objet de grandes divergences théoriques quant à ses délimitations, sa définition exacte, et dont le concept même n’est pas utilisé par toutes les écoles de linguistique. Le but de ce volume est de faire le point sur les facteurs de divergence, sur les concepts limitatifs ou concurrents à celui de détermination, afin de voir si certaines...

L’alternance entre N2’s N1/N1 of N2/N2N1 est généralement expliquée en France par le recours au modèle de la grammaire métaopérationnelle, selon lequel c’est la « soudure » entre les référents de N2 et N1 qui détermine le choix de structure. Le modèle est mis à mal par l’analyse des occurrences du corpus : il est inapte à rendre compte de leur emploi, et sur un plan plus général, il ne remplit pas les principaux critères scientifiques de validité : universalité, raisonnement (...) non circulaire, réfutabilité et pouvoir de prédiction. L’article propose une autre explication de l’alternance en question, élaborée dans un cadre théorique qui rejette l’idée de l’existence systématique d’un invariant sémantique. L’hypothèse avancée est que le choix de structure, en dehors des cas de spécialisation fonctionnelle, se fait principalement selon la fonction de N2. De plus, il est suggéré que s’opère aujourd’hui une poussée du schéma N2N1 et une baisse de productivité du génitif, en cohérence avec le déclin historique du système casuel de l’anglais. (shrink)

Academic philosophy constructs theoretical resources for understanding society by refining reasoning tools, categorizing experience, studying what is valuable and why, and reflecting on knowledge itself. Public philosophy serves a social function by bringing philosophical methods, expertise, and insights to bear on concrete issues, in concrete situations, and in dialogue with actual stakeholders. Public philosophers rarely achieve the cultural prominence of public intellectuals and often have different and more local goals than the political influence typically ascribed to public intellectuals. The chapter (...) examines the specific activities and roles that philosophers play in various public contexts when they construct and evaluate arguments. These six strategies demonstrate the range of philosophy's public value. The strategies, or functions, are classification, criticism, translation, expansion, normativity, and reflection. Philosophers have different ways of engaging in public‐facing activities, and public philosophy can play different roles in an academic career. Public philosophy responds to the changing role of the university and academic research. (shrink)

The Statements on Responsibilities in Tax Practice (SRTPs) provide guidance to the CPA when making decisions in tax practice. Many of these decisions are ethical in nature and have implications for tax compliance. In this study, a survey methodology is used to test whether the SRTPs affect decisions that CPAs make. The findings suggest that a clear majority of CPAs follow the SRTPs when making ethical decisions relating to tax return preparation and that CPAs follow the SRTPs more often than (...) unlicensed preparers on half the issues tested. However, a statistically significant number of CPAs do not follow the SRTPs and, CPAs do not follow the SRTPs any more often than unlicensed tax preparers on three issues. (shrink)

Field philosophy is a method of philosophical practice. As such, it is open or neutral with regard to topic and content, to the social location of collaborators, and to the type of outcome or produ...

Among Bryan Norton’s most influential contributions to environmental philosophy has been his analysis and evaluation of democratic processes for environmental decision-making. He examines actual cases of environmental decision-making in their legal, political, ethical and scientific contexts, and, with contextual constraints and goals in mind, he theorizes concerning what they accomplish and how they can be improved. Informed by the political theories of both John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas, Norton’s pragmatist approach holds that appropriate democratic decision procedures will generate broadly defensible (...) decisions. Thus, his view of environmental decision-making is based in—and requires—inclusive, democratic, empirical inquiry. While accepting these criteria, I examine how, in practice, it is difficult to identify when these conditions have been adequately met. I investigate the limitations of Norton’s proceduralist approach through a case study in community-based forest management in a New York State urban old-growth park. I argue that Norton’s procedural priorities are too rigid given the contextual constraints of local decision-making. While they are useful for guiding an ideal, high standards sense of the decision-making process, less rigid Deweyan considerations of social learning and community engagement often provide sufficient guidelines for evaluating success. (shrink)

Abstract: This essay explores the relation between feminist epistemology and the problem of philosophical skepticism. Even though feminist epistemology has not typically focused on skepticism as a problem, I argue that a feminist contextualist epistemology may solve many of the difficulties facing recent contextualist responses to skepticism. Philosophical skepticism appears to succeed in casting doubt on the very possibility of knowledge by shifting our attention to abnormal contexts. I argue that this shift in context constitutes an attempt to exercise unearned (...) social and epistemic power and that it should be resisted on epistemic and pragmatic grounds. I conclude that skepticism is a problem that feminists can and should take up as they address the social aspects of traditional epistemological problems. (shrink)

We develop the concept of ‘aesthetic practices’ to capture the work needed for population data to be disseminated via government data portals. Specifically, we look at the Census Hub of the European Statistical System and the Danish Ministry of Education’s Data Warehouse. These portals form part of open government data initiatives, which we understand as governing technologies. We argue that to function as such, aesthetic practices are required so that data produced at dispersed sites can be brought into relation and (...) projected as populations in forms such as bar charts, heat maps and tables. Two examples of aesthetic practices are analysed based on ethnographic studies we have conducted on the production of data for the Hub and Warehouse: metadata and data cleaning. Metadata enables data to come into relation by containing and accounting for the differences between data. Data cleaning deals with the indeterminacies and absences of data and involves algorithms to determine what values data can obtain so they can be brought into relation. We attend to how both aesthetic practices involve normative decisions that make absent what exceeds them: embodied knowledge that cannot or has not been documented as well as data that cannot meet the forms required of data portals. While these aesthetic practices are necessary to sustain data portals as ‘sites of projection,’ we also bring critical attention to their performative effects for knowing, enacting and governing populations. (shrink)

Es gibt Gegenstände, von denen gilt, daß es dergleichen Gegenstände nicht gibt. Dieser Satz hat dem Österreicher Alexius Meinong nicht nur Berühmtheit, sondern auch vernichtende Urteile beschert. Hindern konnten sie ihn jedoch keinesfalls daran, die weltweit bekannte Schule der Grazer Gegenstandstheorie zu etablieren. Wertphilosophische, erkenntnistheoretische sowie psychologische Schriften und die Gründung des ersten experimentalpsychologischen Laboratoriums in Österreich komplettieren das Schaffen dieses Philosophen. Meinongs Lebensgeschichte ist die Verquickung der Geschichte seiner Publikationen und der akademischen Aktivitäten seiner kleinen Schule von Schülern. Platz (...) für private Belange schien in jenem Leben, das sich nahezu vier Jahrzehnte in der steiermärkischen Universitätsstadt Graz abspielte, kaum zu sein. Eine äußerst starke Sehschwäche, die Meinong vor Kollegen, Freunden und sogar seiner Frau auf ungewöhnliche Weise zu verbergen suchte, lastete schwer auf ihm. In der ersten vollständigen Biographie Meinongs zeichnet Evelyn Dölling das leidenschaftliche Ringen dieses Denkers um höchste wissenschaftliche Präzision nach. Aus der Recherche des umfangreichen Nachlaßmaterials sowie der zahlreichen Korrespondenzen (8 300 Briefe) entsteht ein Bild von Meinongs Familienleben und seinen Beziehungen zu Freunden, wie man es so bislang nicht kannte. (shrink)

Effective solutions to global warming will likely require coordinated national and international policies. But in the short term, individuals might choose to take actions or not take actions which will reduce their own contribution to global warming. Philosophers have argued that individual action to curb climate emissions is not morally inconsequential. A strong case can be made for individual causal responsibility for the production of the moral harms which would result from climate change. However, the nature of human moral psychology (...) is such that we can expect a lack of moral motivation to assume responsibility at the crucial moment of action. That is, moral agents face “the problem of failed intentions.” This paper assesses the moral value of specific techniques and technologies which promise to increase the ability of moral agents to fulfill their moral intentions. For instance, since individuals typically evaluate others’ actions as less moral than their own, social norming techniques which provide objective information about how one’s climate emissions compare to others can be an effective means of supporting moral action. (shrink)

Meinongs Leben vollzog sich in engen räumlichen Grenzen. Es scheint kaum von besonderen Höhepunkten gekennzeichnet zu sein. Als neunjähriger, im Jahre 1862, verließ er seine Geburtsstadt Lemberg und ging nach Wien, um dort die Schule zu besuchen und später deutsche Philologie und Geschichte zu studieren. Nach Abschluß einer Dissertation über Arnold von Brescia wandte er sich der Philosophie zu und habilitierte sich auf Empfehlung von Franz Brentano mit einer Arbeit über David Hume. Ein schweres Augenleiden, das sehr zeitig schon zu (...) einer fast vollständigen Blindheit führte und das er mit großem Erfindungsreichtum vor Familie, Freunden und administrativen Einrichtungen zu verbergen suchte, hat sein Leben maßgeblich bestimmt. Meinongs weitere akademische Karriere, die Beziehungen zu seiner Frau Doris, zu seinen Freunden und Studenten werden unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Sehschwäche nachgezeichnet. (shrink)

The essays included here represent Fox Keller's attempts to integrate the insights of feminist theory with those of her contemporaries in the history and philosophy of science.

The purpose of this phenomenological study is to describe the experience of enduring marriage in mid-life. The literature reveals a lack of research about contemporary mid-life marriage, reflecting only theoretical pieces and research studies on marital happiness, factors that make a marriage successful, and variables contributing to divorce. Noticeably absent are studies conducted from a phenomenological philosophical perspective. Questioning what enduring marriage involves for individuals in mid-life served to orient the researchers to the meaning of the experience. Seventeen volunteers participated (...) in twenty-six initial and follow-up interviews. Using van Manen's methodological structure of human science research, a composite description that reflects enduring marriage in mid-life emerged. Two essential themes that characterize the experience, The Threads that Bind Us and A Season of Change and seven sub-themes explicating these essential themes portray the partnership of enduring mid-life marriage. The themes that comprise the structure of the experience reflect its form as a relational, time-space, and corporeal phenomenon. The findings are described in detail using narrative description in order to offer a rich account of each theme, and the implications provide a direction for future research. (shrink)

Researchers have considered individual and organizational factors of ethical decision making. However, they have little interest in situational factors :101–125, 2013) which is surprising given the many situations sales persons face. We address this issue using two pilot qualitative studies successively and a 2 by 2 within-subject experiment with sales scenarios. Qualitative and quantitative data are obtained from front-line employees of the main French retail banks that serve low-income customers. We show that the recognition of an ethical issue differs depending (...) on the role behavior salespersons are engaged in and the nature of the conflict of interest they face. Moreover, the combined effect of these two situational characteristics is mediated by moral intensity. This study not only adds evidence on situational factors affecting ethical decision but also extends empirical research on sales ethics by revealing sales situations that are not considered in the empirical literature. The research implications of the findings are discussed along with the study’s limitations and suggestions for future research. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that noun complement modality cannot be treated as dependent on the meanings of lexical embedding predicates or of abstract performatives. Using two types of complement modalities, I show that their meanings and restrictions remain distinct and invariable regardless of the meanings of their embedding predicates. Then, using embedding predicates that can take both types of modalities, I show that the embedding predicates retain their meanings, regardless of the different modalities of their complements, and they can (...) undergo deletions requiring their identity. (shrink)