This paper applies the account developed by Susanna Siegel in The Rationality of Perception to aesthetic cases and explores the implications of such an account for aesthetic engagement as well as curatorial and exhibitionary practices. It argues that one’s prior outlook – expertise, beliefs, desires, fears, preferences, attitudes – can have both aesthetically good and bad influences on perceptual experiences, just as it can have both epistemically good and bad influences. Analysing these bad influences in cases of ‘hijacked’ aesthetic perception (...) will reveal that, unless we recognize that our perception of high-level and low-level aesthetically relevant properties is norm-governed, we will be at a loss to explain what goes wrong in these cases. Just as perception can be rational or irrational, so too can it be apt or inapt. (shrink)

Cases of poor care have been documented across the world. Contrary to professional requirements, evidence indicates that these sometimes go unaddressed. For patients, the outcomes of this inaction are invariably negative. Previous work has either focused on why poor care occurs and what might be done to prevent it, or on the reasons why those who are witness to it find it difficult to raise their concerns. Here, we build on this work but specifically foreground the responsibilities of registrants and (...) students who witness poor care. Acknowledging the challenges associated with raising concerns, we make the case that failure to address poor care is a breach of moral expectation, professional requirement and, sometimes, legal frameworks. We argue that reporting will be more likely to take place if those who wish to enter the profession have a realistic view of the challenges they may encounter. When nurses are provided with robust and applied education on ethics, when “real‐world” cases and exemplars are used in practice and when steps are taken to develop and encourage individual moral courage, we may begin to see positive change. Ultimately however, significant change is only likely to take place where practice cultures invite and welcome feedback, promote critical reflection, and where strong, clear leadership support is shown by those in positions of influence across organisations. (shrink)

ArgumentThis text is a reflection on the fate of a special kind of scientific object - anatomy collections - and their place in contemporary times. Though the phenomenon of keeping and displaying such collections is generally dying out, those specimens which survive continue to puzzle and fascinate us. To understand the current status of such collections, and the nostalgia evoked by the specimens within them, I argue, we should approach them as modern ruins. This allows us to think of them (...) as places of absence, pointing to unfinished lives and unfinished scientific projects. The paper begins with the story of a preserved human face from the Francis I. Rainer anatomical-anthropological collection (Bucharest), and continues by discussing the fate of that collection, and of anatomy collections more widely. Ultimately, the paper asks, what is it that we want to preserve: specimens, practices, or research philosophies? (shrink)

Dans la célèbre réponse qu’il a apportée en son temps à la question : « Qu’est-ce qu’une nation ? », Ernest Renan définit la nation comme un « principe spirituel » formé par la convergence de deux choses : « L’une est dans le passé, l’autre dans le présent. L’une est la possession en commun d’un riche legs de souvenirs ; l’autre est le consentement..

Back in the Good Old Days of Logical Positivism, theories of meaning were part of a normative project that sought not merely to describe the features of language and its use, but so to speak to separate the wheat from the chaff. In this paper, I side with Herman Cappelen (2013) in thinking that we need to rethink and reintroduce the important distinction between sense and nonsense that was ditched along with other normative aspirations during Logical Positivism’s spectacular demise. Despite (...) this, my delineation of the bounds of sense is different from Cappelen’s. One of my goals in the present paper is to argue that category mistakes are paradigmatic examples of nonsensical sentences. To this end I describe one candidate for what it might be that makes category mistakes nonsensical. (shrink)

Le lien entre l’expérience acquise par Machiavel au service de la République florentine (1498-1512) et l’œuvre politique écrite après son éloignement forcé des affaires est explicite. Tous les commentateurs se sont attachés à déceler, dans la correspondance diplomatique et les écrits mineurs ante res perditas, les thèmes qui réapparaîtront de manière aboutie dans les textes majeurs de Machiavel. Cependant, le passage de la pratique à la « théorie » n’est pas immédiat. Le ritratto, composé d’extraits d’expérience regroupés autour d’une question (...) particulière, permet une problématisation originale de l’histoire présente et s’inscrit dans l’écart qui se creuse, tout au long de l’activité diplomatique de Machiavel, entre la politique florentine qu’il est censé servir et sa propre vision des choses. Aussi le traité du Prince se fonde-t-il, non sur une réalité brute, mais sur une expérience déjà disposée dans un certain nombre de ritratti. Un immense effort pour rationaliser la politique à partir du particulier est ainsi entrepris par Machiavel, sans pour autant sacrifier ce qui précisément déclenche cette entreprise et la rend interminable, à savoir, l’irréductibilité de la fortune. (shrink)