The ever increasing ability of medical technology to reshape the human body in fundamental ways—from organ and tissue transplants to reconstructive surgery and prosthetics—is something now largely taken for granted. But for a philosopher, such interventions raise fundamental and fascinating questions about our sense of individual identity and its relationship to the physical body. Drawing on and engaging with philosophers from across the centuries, Jenny Slatman here develops a novel argument: that our own body always entails a strange dimension, (...) a strangeness that enables us to incorporate radical physical changes. (shrink)

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us (...) new models to live by--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time--that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible. In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries--physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives--or the life of the planet--is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, "saving" time-recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature-could also mean that time saves us. (shrink)

"As a doctor, I make every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal, and life's inclination towards death begins as soon as the meridian is past."--C.G. Jung, commentary on The Secret of the Golden FlowerHere collected for the first time are Jung's views on death and immortality, his writings often coinciding with the death of the most (...) significant people in his life. The book shows many of the major themes running throughout the writings, including the relativity of space and time surrounding death, the link between transference and death, and the archetypes shared among the world's religions at the depths of the Self. The book includes selections from "On Resurrection," "The Soul and Death," "Concerning Rebirth," "Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead" from the Collected Works, "Letter to Pastor Pfafflin" from Letters, and "On Life after Death.". (shrink)

This article proposes reconsideration of laws prohibiting paid surrogacy in Australia in light of increasing transnational commercial surrogacy. The social science evidence base concerning domestic surrogacy in developed economies demonstrates that payment alone cannot be used to differentiate “good” surrogacy arrangements from “bad” ones. Compensated domestic surrogacy and the introduction of professional intermediaries and mechanisms such as advertising are proposed as a feasible harm-minimisation approach. I contend that Australia can learn from commercial surrogacy practices elsewhere, without replicating them.

Jenny Teichmann; II*—Perception and Causation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 June 1971, Pages 29–42, https://doi.org/10.1093/ar.

Ryan, Jennie A current search of reliable internet sources gives the present number of recognised major world religions as somewhere between twenty two and twenty five. These religions have approximately 6.9 billion adherents. Recent meta-analysis of a range of surveys into non-belief in 'God' has reported that between 7% and 10% of the world's population identifies as non-theistic . Out of the top fifty countries with the largest percentage of self-professed atheists, , close to 80% are developed, democratic, mostly European (...) countries, with high standards of public healthcare and accessible food, water and housing. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that to create a genomics that offers more gifts than weights, central attention must be paid to questions of justice. This will require expanding bioethical imaginations so that they grasp and can respond to questions of structural inequity. It will necessitate building novel coalitions and collaborations that turn the attention of bioethical governance away from narrow individual questions such as, “Do I consent?” and toward the broader collective question, is this just? What kind of lives (...) and collectivities are made possible? What rights and principles should govern them? The essay ends with one example of this novel coalition building arising from the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It draws lessons from this effort to build new alliances that bridge the social sciences and natural sciences, arts and engineering, to create new kinds of training and thinking that create a genomics that more adequately responds to fundamental questions of justice. (shrink)

Does the real difference between non-consequentialist and consequentialist theories lie in their approach to value? Non-consequentialist theories are thought either to allow a different kind of value (namely, agent-relative value) or to advocate a different response to value ('honouring' rather than 'promoting'). One objection to this idea implies that all normative theories are describable as consequentialist. But then the distinction between honouring and promoting collapses into the distinction between relative and neutral value. A proper description of non-consequentialist theories can only (...) be achieved by including a distinction between temporal relativity and neutrality in addition to the distinction between agent-relativity and agent-neutrality. (shrink)

Boorse’s biostatistical theory states that diseases should be defined in ways that reflect disturbances of biological function and that are objective and value free. We use three examples from contemporary medicine that demonstrate the complex issues that arise when defining the boundaries of disease: polycystic ovary syndrome, chronic kidney disease, and myocardial infarction. We argue that the biostatistical theory fails to provide sufficient guidance on where the boundaries of disease should be drawn, contains ambiguities relating to choice of reference class, (...) and is out of step with medical processes for identifying disease boundaries. Although proponents of the biostatistical theory might regard these practical issues as irrelevant to the aim of providing a theoretical account of disease, we take them to indicate the need for a theoretical account that is adequate for current needs—including limiting new forms of medicalization that are driven by the identification of disease based on dysfunction. Our processes for determining the boundaries for disease need to recognize that there is no value-free method for making these decisions. (shrink)

In William Ockham on Metaphysics, Jenny E. Pelletier gives an account of Ockham's concept of metaphysics as the science of being and God as it emerges sporadically throughout his philosophical and theological work.

The social model of disability gives us the tools not only to challenge the discrimination and prejudice we face, but also to articulate the personal experience of impairment. Recognition of difference is therefore a key part of the assertion of our common humanity and of an ethics of care that promotes our human rights.

The Enlightenment commitment to reason naturally gave rise to a belief in the perfectibility of man. Influenced by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many eighteenth-century writers argued that the proper education and upbringing—breeding—could make any man a member of the cultural elite. Yet even in this egalitarian environment, the concept of breeding remained tied to theories of blood lineage, caste distinction, and biological difference. Turning to the works of Locke, Rousseau, Swift, Defoe, and other giants of the British Enlightenment, (...) class='Hi'>Jenny Davidson revives the debates that raged over the husbandry of human nature and highlights their critical impact on the development of eugenics, the emergence of fears about biological determinism, and the history of the language itself. Combining rich historical research with a keen sense of story, she links explanations for the physical resemblance between parents and children to larger arguments about culture and society and shows how the threads of this compelling conversation reveal the character of a century. A remarkable intellectual history, _Breeding_ not only recasts the fundamental concerns of the Enlightenment but also uncovers the seeds of thought that bloomed into contemporary notions of human perfectibility. (shrink)

I develop a theory of counterfactuals about relative computability, i.e. counterfactuals such as 'If the validity problem were algorithmically decidable, then the halting problem would also be algorithmically decidable,' which is true, and 'If the validity problem were algorithmically decidable, then arithmetical truth would also be algorithmically decidable,' which is false. These counterfactuals are counterpossibles, i.e. they have metaphysically impossible antecedents. They thus pose a challenge to the orthodoxy about counterfactuals, which would treat them as uniformly true. What’s more, I (...) argue that these counterpossibles don’t just appear in the periphery of relative computability theory but instead they play an ineliminable role in the development of the theory. Finally, I present and discuss a model theory for these counterfactuals that is a straightforward extension of the familiar comparative similarity models. (shrink)

The claim presented here is that aesthetic considerations are an essential part of place narrative, and are thus essential to ethical environmental decision-making. Holland’s narrative-based approach to nature conservation is taken as a starting point from which an argument is developed to show how his approach can be extended to include the aesthetic. Aesthetic experience of place is important because it gives us knowledge by acquaintance of the place, because it gives meaning to our relationship to the place, and because (...) it reveals and gives insight to meaningful relationships within the place. The narrative approach allows these experiences and meanings, which are problematic to other approaches, to be captured and included in environmental decision-making. (shrink)

The Greek word eoikos can be translated in various ways. It can be used to describe similarity, plausibility or even suitability. This book explores the philosophical exploitation of its multiple meanings by three philosophers, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato. It offers new interpretations of the way that each employs the term to describe the status of their philosophy, tracing the development of this philosophical use of eoikos from the fallibilism of Xenophanes through the deceptive cosmology of Parmenides to Plato's Timaeus. The (...) central premise of the book is that, in reflecting on the eoikos status of their accounts, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato are manipulating the contexts and connotations of the term as it has been used by their predecessors. By focusing on this continuity in the development of the philosophical use of eoikos, the book serves to enhance our understanding of the epistemology and methodology of Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato's Timaeus. (shrink)

This paper argues that a worthwhile life is one in which the meaningful relationships existing in nature are recognised and respected. A meaningful relationship occurs when the interactions between two entities have significance in their past history and its anticipated continuation. The form in which the history of both the human and the non-human is related is narrative. A life is enriched or impoverished by the subject's relationships to other people and nature, and as such is more or less worthwhile. (...) The argument presented here shows how Alan Holland's approach to conservation decision making can be extended to have relevance to individual lives, and that a strong ethical position can be developed from this insight. (shrink)

The emergence of population as an object of government in the 18th century produced a new problematic of government. The focus of this new problematic was how to ensure that the pursuit of self-interest by individual economic actors was compatible with the reproduction and useful employment of the population. From the 18th century to the present, government in the West has addressed this problem in a number of different ways, each of which represents a 'tricky adjust ment' between a liberal (...) element concerned with commercial freedom and a pastoral element concerned with the welfare of the population. The tension between the liberal and pastoral elements of modern Western governance is explored by examining the place of commercial freedom within a householding concept of rule in which security at the level of the state is dependent upon the sovereign's rational management of the population. (shrink)

Political oeconomy in the 18th century operated in the absence of the conception of an autonomous social order articulated in the later concepts of `the economy' and `society'. Without a self-sustaining mechanism oriented to stability and endogenous economic growth, national prosperity and social order were assumed to depend upon the detailed interventions in economic life that are characteristic of mercantilism and the police of the poor. Smith's theory that autonomous economic growth underpinned a stable order of social interdependencies based upon (...) the division of labour allowed him to move beyond or modify these assumptions. It freed him from the ideas that constant interference in the relationship between agriculture and manufacturing was necessary in order to guarantee food security and that social order and national prosperity depended upon enforcing constraints upon the interests of wage earners. (shrink)

David Stove's essay “The intellectual capacity of women” was first published in 1990, in the Proceedings of a Sydney philosophical society. It has been re-published twice since his death. It seems though that during his lifetime Stove himself refused to agree to its being re-printed. This raises two questions: Did Stove believe his essay on women contains mistakes? And: does it contain mistakes? The main flaws in the essay stem from a rash adoption of simplistic ideas about probability coupled with (...) a question-begging definition of capacity. The work also contains contradictions and exaggerations and some unwise forays into social history. Stove was an intelligent man so it seems likely that he would have recognised those flaws. (shrink)

In the 18th century Adam Smith argued that in a commercial society based on the division of labour, a rising standard of living for all was possible and desirable. At the same time Smith regretted that a preoccupation with material goods and social status had displaced a more expansive notion of human nature. This tension is a recurrent theme in European social thought. It underlies the social vision of the architects of postwar reconstruction and the welfare state in Australia after (...) the Second World War as it is presented in the writings of Herbert Cole Coombs. Coombs worked to achieve a rising standard of living for ordinary Australians but believed that both living standards and human development could best be achieved through publicly funded services rather than private consumption. Unlike Smith, whose moral philosophy sees human nature as a reflection of God’s nature, Coombs’s social vision was thoroughly secular. This study explores how, in the absence of a religious justification, Coombs formulated the conviction that a life bounded by the aspirations to own a house, a car and the consumer durables that were beginning to be available to ordinary people - in other words to be a ‘good provider’ - lacks an essential element of what it means to be fully human. (shrink)

Braun explores the use of digital twin technology in medicine with a particular emphasis on the question of how such simulations can represent a person.1 In defining some first conditions for ethically justifiable forms of representation of digital twins, he argues that digital twins do not threaten an embodied person, as long as that person retains control over their simulated representation via dynamic consent, and ideally with the option to choose both form and usage of the simulation. His thoughtful elaboration (...) provides insight into the challenges inherent in interactions between a person and their digital twin, emphasising the modes of control required to respect personal modes of freedom. This individual-centric approach to the question of representation leaves out the important ethical consideration of ensuring that all, not merely some, can be represented. Braun describes dynamic consent as a necessary mode of control, arguing that where a person is unable to give consent, ‘such simulations threaten to become illegitimate representations. They would then shift the kind of interaction from representation to illegitimate forms of prediction or surveillance and thereby could lead to infringements to individual modes of freedom.’ Consequently, the implementation of digital twin technology in healthcare would seem to exclude the most vulnerable members of society from participation in and benefiting from medical innovation, …. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the various meanings of embodiment from a patient’s perspective. Resorting to phenomenology of health and medicine, I take the idea of ‘lived experience’ as starting point. On the basis of an analysis of phenomenology’s call for bracketing the natural attitude and its reduction to the transcendental, I will explain, however, that in medical phenomenological literature ‘lived experience’ is commonly one-sidedly interpreted. In my paper, I clarify in what way the idea of ‘lived experience’ should be (...) revisited and, subsequently, what this reconsideration means for phenomenological research on embodiment in health and medicine. The insight that the body is a condition of possibility for world-disclosing yet, at the same time, itself conditioned by this world forces us to not only zoom in on the body’s subject-side, but also on its object-side. I argue that in order to render account for this double body ontology, phenomenology should include empirical sociological analyses as well. I thus argue in favor of the idea of a socio-phenomenology. Drawing on material from my own research project on embodied self-experiences after breast surgery, I show how this approach can be fruitful in interpreting the impact of disfigurements on a person’s embodied agency, or a person’s ‘I can’. (shrink)

The meaning of κερτομω and its congeners in Homer has been the subject of debate in this journal. Jones has argued that ‘to κερτομω someone is to speak in such a way as to provoke a powerful emotional reaction’, whether of anger or fear, and thus means ‘“to utter stinging words at [someone]”, “pierce to the heart”, “cut to the quick”, rather than merely “provoke” This definition seems to work well enough for some cases, but certainly not for all, and (...) especially not for the passage from which the whole controversy began: Iliad 24.649, where Achilles speaks to Priam ༐πικερτομέωυ. As Richardson says in his Iliad commentary, ‘there is no sign that Akhilleus’ speech has this direct effect [i.e. arouses fear] on Priam’. Jones's article was responding to an earlier one by J. T. Hooker, who attempted to ascertain the sense of Achilles’ ༐πικερτομέυ by surveying the usage of kertom- words throughout Homeric epic. He concluded that the basic meaning is ‘to taunt’ or, more abstractly, it ‘indicates the provocation of another person into behaving in a certain way, whether that is the behaviour desired by the speaker… or is not desired by the speaker’. The problem was that this definition did not seem to fit the very line from which his inquiry began, the words of Achilles to Priam. Hooker then hypothesized that the verse betrayed signs of an ‘imperfect adaptation’ of a different version of the poem in which Achilles taunted a defeated enemy or perhaps preserved his grudge against Agamemnon to its end. This explanation is unpersuasive. (shrink)

This essay investigates the Zhuangzian theory of the self, which has long been the subject of a heated and controversial debate in Chinese intellectual history. According to an interpretation that has been quite prominent since the 1990s, the self in the Zhuangzi is a substantial, persisting self; it is a simple, basic object that is distinct from its properties. A substance, generally speaking, is an object or entity that has properties. Substance metaphysicians claim that substances, as primary units of reality, (...) are unchanging entities in themselves that bear changing properties over time.Some scholars, such as Kuang-ming Wu, Yi Wu, and Leo K. C. Cheung, believe that the self in... (shrink)

Given his known predilection for ontological parsimony, Ockham’s ontology of artifacts is unsurprisingly reductionist: artifacts are nothing over and above their existing and appropriately ordered parts. However, the case of artifacts is notable in that they are real objects that human artisans produce by bringing about a real change: they spatially rearrange existing natural thing(s) or their parts for the sake of some end. This article argues that the human contribution to the nature and production of artifacts is two-fold: (1) (...) the artisan’s cognitive grasp of her expertise and her decision to deploy that expertise are the two efficient causes necessary to explain the existence of an artifact, and (2) the purpose that the artisan had in mind when she decided to make an artifact fixes the function(s) of the artifact such that an artisan’s purpose is the final cause necessary to explain what an artifact is. Artifacts indeed exist, owing what they are and that they are to intelligent and volitional human activity, which Ockham never denies. The article submits that a myopic focus on Ockham’s indisputable reductionism does not exhaust what is metaphysically interesting and relevant about artifacts. (shrink)

This open access book presents an ethical approach to utilizing personal medical data. It features essays that combine academic argument with practical application of ethical principles. The contributors are experts in ethics and law. They address the challenges in the re-use of medical data of the deceased on a voluntary basis. This pioneering study looks at the many factors involved when individuals and organizations wish to share information for research, policy-making, and humanitarian purposes. -/- Today, it is easy to donate (...) blood or even organs, but it is virtually impossible to donate one’s own medical data. This is seen as ethically unacceptable. Yet, data donation can greatly benefit the welfare of our societies. This collection provides timely interdisciplinary research on biomedical big data. Topics include the ethics of data donation, the legal and regulatory challenges, and the current and future collaborations. -/- Readers will learn about the ethical and regulatory challenges associated with medical data donations. They will also better understand the special nature of using deceased data for research purposes with regard to ethical principles of autonomy, beneficence, and justice. In addition, the contributors identify the key governance issues of such a scheme. The essays also look at what we can learn in terms of best practice from existing medical data schemes. (shrink)

This article considers how Christ’s mission is furthered by international theological education in the 21st century. The sociological and missiological roles of education in forming culture are briefly introduced, followed by a discussion of the benefits of international theological education in particular. An overview of international student migration is given before considering a contemporary example of international theological education. A case study is shared on the migration outcomes of foreign international graduates from a US seminary. Six life circumstances of these (...) international students are examined for correlation with their geographic choice of location upon graduation. Missiological implications from these results are discussed. Findings are relevant for ministry organizations, churches, and institutions. (shrink)

This book will give unique insight into how a new generation of Bourdieusian researchers apply Bourdieu to contemporary issues. It will provide a discussion of the working mechanisms of thinking through and/or with Bourdieu when analysing data. In each chapter, individual authors discuss and reflect upon their own research and the ways in which they put Bourdieu to work. The aim of this book is not to just to provide examples of the development of Bourdieusian research, but for each author (...) to reflect on the ways in which they came across Bourdieu's work, why it speaks to them (including a reflexive consideration of their own background), and the way in which it is thus useful in their thinking. Many of the authors were introduced to Bourdieu's works after his death. The research problems which the individual authors tackle are contextualised in a different time and space to the one Bourdieu occupied when he was developing his conceptual framework. This book will demonstrate how his concepts can be applied as "thinking tools" to understand contemporary social reality. Throughout Bourdieu's career, he argued that sociologists need to create an epistemological break, to abandon our common sense - or as much as we can - and to formulate findings from our results. In essence, we are putting Bourdieu to work to provide a structural constructivist approach to social reality anchored through empirical reflexivity. (shrink)