ABSTRACTThe principle of informed refusal poses a specific problem when it is invoked by a pregnant woman who, in spite of having accepted her pregnancy, refuses the diagnostic and/or therapeutic measures that would ensure the well‐being of her endangered fetus. Guidelines issued by professional bodies in the developed world are conflicting: either they allow autonomy and informed consent to be overruled to the benefit of the fetus, or they recommend the full respect of these principles. A number of medical ethicists (...) advocate the overruling of alleged irrational or unreasonable refusal for the benefit of the fetus. The present essay supports the view of fetal rights to health and to life based on the principle that an ‘accepted’ fetus is a ‘third person’. In developing countries, however, the implementation of the latter principle is likely to be in conflict with a ‘communitarian’ perception of the individual – in this case, the pregnant woman. Within the scope of the limitations to the right to autonomy of J.S. Mill's ‘harm principle’, the South African Patients’ Charter makes provision for informed refusal. The fact that, in practice, it is not implemented illustrates the well‐known difficulty of applying Western bioethical principles in real life in the developing world. (shrink)

Résumé Le discours sur la traduction s’est essentiellement montré picturaliste, faisant usage de métaphores telles que la copie ou le travestissement, qui inscrivent l’acte de traduire dans une logique de la transparence dont les conséquences sont désastreuses. La transparence commande, en particulier, l’effacement du traducteur auquel toute subjectivité est déniée. Mais une voie existe pour rompre la chaîne qui relie la transparence à l’effacement en passant par l’illusion ; se détourner de l’image, du figurable, et porter son attention sur le (...) pan souvent oublié de l’acte de traduction – le versant sonore des choses, l’écoute – apparaît comme un cheminement beaucoup plus fructueux. (shrink)

A citizen’s jury brings together a mix of citizens from different socio-economic groups who deliberate on a particular policy issue over a number of days. Since their development in the 1970s in th...

The South African Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act 92 of 1996 gives women the right to voluntary abortion on request. The reality factor, however, is that five years later there are still more ‘technically illegal’ abortions than legal ones. Amongst other factors, one of the main obstacles to access to this constitutionally enshrined human right is the right to conscientious objection/refusal. Although the right to conscientious objection is also a basic human right, the case of refusal to provide abortion (...) services on conscientious objection grounds should not be seen as absolute and inalienable, at least in the developing world. In the developed world, where referral to another service provider is for the most part accessible, a conscientious objector to abortion does not really put the abortion seeker’s life at risk. The same cannot be said in developing countries even when abortion is decriminalised. This is because referral procedures are fraught with major obstacles. Therefore, it is argued that the right to conscientious objection to abortion should be limited by the circumstances in which the request for abortion arises. (shrink)

The South African Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act 92 of 1996 gives women the right to voluntary abortion on request. The reality factor, however, is that five years later there are still more ‘technically illegal’ abortions than legal ones. Amongst other factors, one of the main obstacles to access to this constitutionally enshrined human right is the right to conscientious objection/refusal. Although the right to conscientious objection is also a basic human right, the case of refusal to provide abortion (...) services on conscientious objection grounds should not be seen as absolute and inalienable, at least in the developing world. In the developed world, where referral to another service provider is for the most part accessible, a conscientious objector to abortion does not really put the abortion seeker’s life at risk. The same cannot be said in developing countries even when abortion is decriminalised. This is because referral procedures are fraught with major obstacles. Therefore, it is argued that the right to conscientious objection to abortion should be limited by the circumstances in which the request for abortion arises. (shrink)

Representing the thinking of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, coaches, and sports writers, these essays bring together a wide range of approaches to ...

This article focuses on the experiences of social care workers during the first wave of the Covid pandemic. The method involved analyzing diaries kept by 65 professionals in 8 French regions during the first lockdown in France in the spring of 2020. As a form of non-binding, narrative expression, keeping diaries breaks with traditional models of reporting common in social care structures and allowed professionals to reflect on the experience as it was lived. In the diaries, professionals explored how the (...) crisis disrupted and challenged their personal and professional values but also allowed innovation in care practices for vulnerable populations that will continue beyond the pandemic period. Five care values were put to forefront by professionals: (1) spontaneity/flexibility; (2) respect for persons; (3) team reflexivity; (4) innovation; (5) solidarity. Mobilizing philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s ideas on recognition, Payet and Laforgue’s analysis of weak actors, as well as research on moral distress, we discuss how these values were tested during the crisis and what effect they had on professionals’ and users’ vulnerabilities. We will also elaborate the interest of keeping account of social care work through narrative methods. (shrink)

The dominant discourse in chronic disease management centres on the ideal of person-centred healthcare, with an empowered patient taking an active role in decision-making with their healthcare provider. Despite these encouraging developments toward healthcare democracy, many person-centred conceptions of healthcare and programming continue to focus on the healthcare institution’s perspective and priorities. In these debates, the patient’s voice has largely been absent. This article takes the example of patient empowerment to show how the concept has been influenced by a variety (...) of competing and shifting influences that have led to conceptualisations and programming designed for the patient, but developed without the patient. The framework of epistemic injustice is proposed to unravel the complexity of these omissions. The concept can be defined as a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. It occurs when a person is ignored or not believed due to a prejudice of some kind. It has been applied to healthcare in order to better understand barriers for patient participation and will be used to better understand the problems with current empowerment definitions and implementation strategies. The article will end by proposing some methodologies to facilitate patient-developed concepts of empowerment. (shrink)

Habitat fragmentation produces isolated patches characterized by increased edge effects from an originally continuous habitat. The shapes of these patches often show a high degree of irregularity: their shapes deviate significantly from regular geometrical shapes such as rectangular and elliptical ones. In fractal theory, the geometry of patches created by a common landscape transformation process should be statistically similar, i.e. their fractal dimensions and their form factors should be equal. In this paper, we analyze 49 woodlot fragments (Pinus sylvestris L.) (...) in the Belgian Kempen region to study the direct relationship between a transformation process and the concomitant patch geometry. Although the fractal dimension of the woodlots is scattered (i.e. they are not statistically similar), the perimeter-area relation of the fragments is characterized by a single, ‘dimension-like’ exponent. This exponent suggests a certain shape homogeneity among the patches, which is confirmed by the absence of hierarchical levels associated with sharp increases of the fractal dimension at scale transitions. The interaction of different natural (soil factor, vegetation type) and anthropogenic (afforestation, urbanization) processes during patch development is assumed to have generated this feature. Comparison of the area and perimeter fractal dimension with an ecological index for habitat quality, the interior-to-edge ratio, shows that the fractal dimension is suitable for predicting interior habitat presence, which is more likely for patches with smooth perimeters and compact areas. The ratio of the area to the perimeter fractal dimension confirms this observation, with high values for high interior-to-edge ratios, characteristic for regularly shaped patches. (shrink)

From a theoretical perspective, most discussions of statistical learning have focused on the possible “statistical” properties that are the object of learning. Much less attention has been given to defining what “learning” is in the context of “statistical learning.” One major difficulty is that SL research has been monitoring participants’ performance in laboratory settings with a strikingly narrow set of tasks, where learning is typically assessed offline, through a set of two-alternative-forced-choice questions, which follow a brief visual or auditory familiarization (...) stream. Is that all there is to characterizing SL abilities? Here we adopt a novel perspective for investigating the processing of regularities in the visual modality. By tracking online performance in a self-paced SL paradigm, we focus on the trajectory of learning. In a set of three experiments we show that this paradigm provides a reliable and valid signature of SL performance, and it offers important insights for understanding how statistical regularities are perceived and assimilated in the visual modality. This demonstrates the promise of integrating different operational measures to our theory of SL. (shrink)

Ensuring patient participation in healthcare decision making remains a difficult task. Factors such as a lack of time in the consultation, medical objectivation, or the difficulties of translating individual patient experience into the treatment plan have been shown to limit patient contributions. Little research attention has focused however on how emotions experienced by both the patient and the healthcare provider may affect the ability of the patient to participate. In this research, patient’s and healthcare provider’s emotions were identified and analysed. (...) The research method showed fear as a prominent emotion experienced. This included patient’s fears both inside and outside the consultation, as well as the healthcare provider’s fears in their professional practice. Using Martha Nussbaum’s cognitive-evaluative theory of emotions as an additional means of analysis, the research looked at what this emotion could show about the importance of the object of this fear to the person’s eudaimonia (flourishing). At the end of the article, several solutions were proposed to help mitigate this fear to keep it from becoming a destructive force in the healthcare provider—patient relationship. (shrink)

French existentialism is commonly regarded as the main impetus for the universal significance that Kafka gained in postwar France. A leading critic, Marthe Robert, has contended that this entailed an outright rejection of interest in the biographical, linguistic and historical dimension of Kafka's writing in order to interpret it as a general expression of the human condition. This article will consider this claim in the light of Sartre's original conceptualization of a dialectic of the universal and the particular in the (...) intercultural mediation of the work of art. The notion of a 'true universality' proposed by Sartre as a defence of Kafka during the 1962 Moscow Peace Conference will allow for a reassessment of Robert's criticism in a paradoxical reversal of terms: it is precisely the inevitable loss of context and the appropriation within one's own particular situation which allow the literary work to elucidate a foreign historical context and thereby gain a wider significance. Rather than a universal meaning of the work, Sartre's concept points to literature's potential to continually release specific meanings in new contexts. (shrink)

This paper addresses theoretical challenges, still relevant today, that arose in the first decades of the twentieth century related to the concept of the organism. During this period, new insights into the plasticity and robustness of organisms as well as their complex interactions fueled calls, especially in the UK and in the German-speaking world, for grounding biological theory on the concept of the organism. This new organism-centered biology understood organisms as the most important explanatory and methodological unit in biological investigations. (...) At least three theoretical strands can be distinguished in this movement: Organicism, dialectical materialism, and holistic biology. This paper shows that a major challenge of OCB was to describe the individual organism as a causally autonomous and discrete unit with consistent boundaries and, at the same time, as inextricably interwoven with its environment. In other words, OCB had to conciliate individualistic with anti-individualistic perspectives. This challenge was addressed by developing a concept of life that included functionalist and metabolic elements, as well as biochemical and physical ones. It allowed for specifying organisms as life forms that actively delimit themselves from the environment. Finally, this paper shows that the recent return to the concept of the organism, especially in the so-called “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,” is challenged by similar anti-individualistic tendencies. However, in contrast to its early-twentieth-century forerunner, today’s organism-centered approaches have not yet offered a solution to this problem. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction, as applied both to properties and to relations. In contrast to other accounts, the approach taken here locates the source of a property’s intrinsicality or extrinsicality in the manner in which that property is ‘logically constituted’, and thus – plausibly – in its nature or essence, rather than in e.g. its modal profile. Another respect in which the present proposal differs from many extant analyses lies in the fact that it does (...) not seek to analyse the ‘global’ distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties on the basis of the ‘local’ distinction between having a property intrinsically and having it extrinsically. Instead, the latter distinction is explicated on the basis of the former. (shrink)

In recent years, biologists and philosophers of science have argued that evolutionary theory should incorporate more seriously the idea of ‘reciprocal causation.’ This notion refers to feedback loops whereby organisms change their experiences of the environment or alter the physical properties of their surroundings. In these loops, in particular niche constructing activities are central, since they may alter selection pressures acting on organisms, and thus affect their evolutionary trajectories. This paper discusses long-standing problems that emerge when studying such reciprocal causal (...) processes between organisms and environments. By comparing past approaches to reciprocal causation from the early twentieth century with contemporary ones in niche construction theory, we identify two central reoccurring problems: All of these approaches have not been able to provide a conceptual framework that allows maintaining meaningful boundaries between organisms and environments, instead of merging the two, and integrating experiential and physical kinds of reciprocal causation. By building on case studies of niche construction research, we provide a model that is able to solve these two problems. It allows distinguishing between mutually interacting organisms and environments in complex scenarios, as well as integrating various forms of experiential and physical niche construction. (shrink)

I respond to this article agreeing with Nyika.

ABSTRACT The principle of informed refusal poses a specific problem when it is invoked by a pregnant woman who, in spite of having accepted her pregnancy, refuses the diagnostic and/or therapeutic measures that would ensure the well‐being of her endangered fetus. Guidelines issued by professional bodies in the developed world are conflicting: either they allow autonomy and informed consent to be overruled to the benefit of the fetus, or they recommend the full respect of these principles. A number of medical (...) ethicists advocate the overruling of alleged irrational or unreasonable refusal for the benefit of the fetus. The present essay supports the view of fetal rights to health and to life based on the principle that an ‘accepted’ fetus is a ‘third person’. In developing countries, however, the implementation of the latter principle is likely to be in conflict with a ‘communitarian’ perception of the individual – in this case, the pregnant woman. Within the scope of the limitations to the right to autonomy of J.S. Mill's ‘harm principle’, the South African Patients’ Charter makes provision for informed refusal. The fact that, in practice, it is not implemented illustrates the well‐known difficulty of applying Western bioethical principles in real life in the developing world. (shrink)

This article deals with the concept of sentience, and more specifically with the argument from sentience as it is used by utilitarians in the abortion debate and in the advocacy of animal rights. It is argued that sentience is more than feeling pleasure and pain (with empha sis on pain), and that pain is an inborn protection required to fit into the world rather than the substance of evil. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.23(3) 2004: 292-301.

Insight problem solving is thought to underpin creative thought as it incorporates both divergent (generating multiple ideas and solutions) and convergent (arriving at the optimal solution) thinking approaches. The current literature on schizotypy and creativity is mixed and requires clarification. An alternate approach was employed by designing an exploratory web-based study using only correlates of schizotypal traits (paranoia, dissociation, cognitive failures, fantasy proneness, and unusual sleep experiences) and examining which (if any) predicted optimal performance on an insight problem-solving task. One (...) hundred and twenty-one participants were recruited online from the general population and completed the number reduction task. The discovery of the hidden rule (HR) was used as a measure of insight. Multivariate logistic regression analyses highlighted persecutory ideation to best predict the discovery of the HR (OR = 1.05; 95% CI 1.01–1.10, p = 0.017), with a one-point increase in persecutory ideas corresponding to the participant being 5% more likely to discover the HR. This result suggests that persecutory ideation, above other schizotypy correlates, may be involved in insight problem solving. (shrink)

Isolated habitats, the consequence of the fragmentation process, are the object of external disturbance. This divides the patch area into two zones: interior and edge. The interior-to-edge ratio quantifies the potential disturbance impact. A method is presented to calculate a reference value for the interior-to-edge ratio, based upon the minimum edge for a given interior. The method is based on pixel geometry features and mathematical morphology. A corrected interior-to-edge ratio is defined using the reference value. The method is illustrated for (...) woodlot fragments in the Belgian Kempen region. (shrink)

The comic book hero Superman grew from a social crusader and a “champion of the oppressed” in the 1930s, to a patriotic and paternalistic fighter for “Truth, Justice, and the American way” in the 1940s and 1950s, to a compassionate Christ‐like savior in the latter part of the twentieth century – and always defending the Judeo‐Christian values upheld by the American majority. Friedrich Nietzsche’s “superman,” on the other hand, firmly rejects the very same values its superhero namesake upholds. While it (...) has been a common trope in the superhero genre and popular culture in general to characterize figures explicitly based on Nietzsche’s Übermensch as inhuman monsters, this chapter argues that Nietzsche’s concept can be reinstated through the character of Superman himself. Like Übermensch, Superman is strong, creative, noble, independent, and life‐affirming, but unlike him, Superman is compassionate and looks out for the little guy. (shrink)