This book explores how shamanic Daoist practices help cultivate the skills of an elicitive peaceworker. Author Kathleen McGoey uses embodied writing to describe her direct experiences with qigong and other meditation forms, and to explain the creation of inner peace that ultimately extends far beyond the individual. A trans-rational understanding of peace weaves together transpersonal interpretations of intuition with ancient Daoist wisdom. By relating the outcomes of such approaches to real world conflict transformation, McGoey proposes a practical personal consciousness (...) that strives for harmony with our's and others' environments. (Series: Masters of Peace - Vol. 9). (shrink)

Palliative Care Nursing: Caring for Suffering Patients explores the concept of suffering as it relates to nursing practice. This text helps practicing nurses and students define and recognize various aspects of suffering across the lifespan and within various patient populations while providing guidance in alleviating suffering. In addition, it examines spiritual and ethical perspectives on suffering and discusses how witnessing suffering impacts nurses' ability to assume the professional role. Further, the authors discuss ways nurses as witnesses to suffering can optimize (...) their own coping skills and facilitate personal growth. Rich in case studies, pictures, and reflections on nursing practice and life experiences, Palliative Care Nursing: Caring for Suffering Patients delves into key topics such as how to identify when a patient is suffering, whether they are coping, sources of coping facades, what to do to ease suffering, and how to convey the extent of suffering to members of the health care team.Palliative Care Nursing: Caring for Suffering Patients helps practicing nurses and students define and recognize various aspects of suffering across the lifespan and within various patient populations while providing guidance in alleviating suffering. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Divine by Alan P.F. SellKathy SquadritoAlan P.F. Sell. John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Divine. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997. Pp. xi + 444. Cloth, $75.00.Professor Sell’s goal is to discern the impact of Locke’s thought upon the later divines; Sell’s scope is the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century. Most of the text is a detailed descriptive account of various scholars’ reactions (...) to Locke’s epistemology, metaphysics, and views concerning religion. Sell focuses on the question of the relative authority of scripture, reason and revelation. He contends that Locke’s epistemological and political positions are intimately bound up with his Christian faith, that as a conservative empiricist, Locke is “much more the rationalist than he has sometimes been painted” (48). The important question bequeathed by Locke to Christian apologetics is: “can the epistemological starting point be redeemed for Christian apologetic use or is it not viable at all?” (12). Sell addresses this question throughout the following chapters: “Ideas, Knowledge and Truth”; “Reason, Revelation, Faith and Scripture”; “Morality and Liberty”; “Toleration and Government”; and “Christian Doctrine”.Sell notes Locke’s roots in Calvinism, his appreciation of Arminian doctrine and his friendship with a number of prominent Latitudinarians. He argues that most criticisms of Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity are misguided. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Locke was charged with scepticism, deism, Socinianism and materialism. Sell presents the objections of numerous scholars, notably Bishop Stillingfleet, William Carroll, John Norris, Richard Bentley, Henry Lee, Richard Price, Bishop Berkeley, and Samuel Johnson. He also covers the views of Locke’s defenders, including Anthony Collins, Catharine Cockburn and Samuel Bold.The reader might be disappointed with Sell’s short presentation of an inordinate number of Lockean critics; there is little analysis or discussion of the merits of the particular objections cited. He does offer an analysis of the general charges against Locke, but rarely quotes Locke sufficiently to justify his conclusion that Locke was not a deist, sceptic, or materialist. Sell simply takes Locke’s word for it. This book is best taken as an excellent reference guide.Sell contends that in spite of Locke’s friendship with deists such as Collins, Locke’s Reasonableness of the Christian Religion was written to dissolve the deist prejudice against Christianity. He dismisses the charge of deism because: (1) Locke argues for revelation and against natural religion, (2) Locke’s God possesses the traditional attributes assigned to him (power, omniscience, providence), (3) Locke grounds morality not exclusively in natural law, as did deists, but in the gospel, (4) the anti-materialist thrust of Book IV, Chapter X of the Essay, and (5) Locke’s argument that there can be truths of revelation which are above reason. Sell concludes that the “main problem posed to Locke by the deists was that of guilt by association” (209), in other words Locke’s work was misused for political reasons.Sell considers the charge of Socinianism more serious than that of deism. Socinianism is defined by its denial of the Trinity, and by the claims that there cannot be an innate idea of God, that there is no original corruption deriving from Adam, that the wicked will not suffer eternal torments, and that some bodies are not raised at general resurrection. Despite Locke’s agreement with most Socinian claims, Sell claims that [End Page 631] Locke cannot be pinned down on the issue of the Trinity. There is no question, he says, that “the Locke of 1662 affirmed both the doctrine of the Trinity and the human divine nature of Christ, whilst recognizing that the human mind could not explain how these things could be so; there is no question that especially from the 1690’s onwards he was actively reviewing the matter; there is no hard evidence that he ever repudiated the doctrine.” (214)According to Stillingfleet, Locke’s sensationalism and his proposal that matter might be capable of thought undermine Christian faith. Sell does not find this charge convincing. He defends Locke’s distinction between “the man” and “the person,” stressing that Locke claims a high degree of probability that the... (shrink)

BackgroundCommunity engagement in research has gained momentum as an approach to improving research, to helping ensure that community concerns are taken into account, and to informing ethical decision-making when research is conducted in contexts of vulnerability. However, guidelines and scholarship regarding community engagement are arguably unsettled, making it difficult to implement and evaluate.DiscussionWe describe normative guidelines on community engagement that have been offered by national and international bodies in the context of HIV-related research, which set the stage for similar work (...) in other health related research. Next, we review the scholarly literature regarding community engagement, outlining the diverse ethical goals ascribed to it. We then discuss practical guidelines that have been issued regarding community engagement. There is a lack of consensus regarding the ethical goals and approaches for community engagement, and an associated lack of indicators and metrics for evaluating success in achieving stated goals. To address these gaps we outline a framework for developing indicators for evaluating the contribution of community engagement to ethical goals in health research.SummaryThere is a critical need to enhance efforts in evaluating community engagement to ensure that the work on the ground reflects the intentions expressed in the guidelines, and to investigate the contribution of specific community engagement practices for making research responsive to community needs and concerns. Evaluation mechanisms should be built into community engagement practices to guide best practices in community engagement and their replication across diverse health research settings. (shrink)

Medical Professionals: Conflicts and Quandaries in Medical Practice offers a fresh approach to understanding the role-related conflicts and quandaries that pervade contemporary medical practice. While a focus on professional conflicts is not new in the literature, what is missing is a volume that delves into medical professionals' own experience of the conflicts and quandaries they face, often as a result of inhabiting multiple roles. The volume explores the ways in which these conflicts and quandaries are exacerbated by broader societal forces, (...) including changing scientific and technological paradigms, commercialization, and strengthened consumer movements, which simultaneously expand the scope of roles and responsibilities that medical professionals are expected to fulfill, and make it more difficult to do so. Several empirical chapters analyze data from qualitative interview studies with clinicians and other stakeholders. The studies highlight the burdens on clinicians who are expected to make informed and justified judgments and decisions in the midst of competing pressures; authors describe the methods that clinicians use to address the associated tensions within specific contexts. Two conceptual chapters follow and offer some innovative ways to think about the challenges facing medical professionals as they strive to make sense of the changing landscape within healthcare. The first reflects on the challenges to clinical practice in the midst of shifting and often competing definitions of disease and associated ideologies of care. The second reflects more broadly on the utility of value pluralism as a framework for conceptualizing and working through moral and professional quandaries. The book concludes with a chapter containing suggestions for how members of the medical profession might reframe their thinking about their roles, responsibilities, and decision-making in the midst of inevitable quandaries such as those presented here. This book will be of vital reading for academics, researchers, educators, postgraduate students, and interested health care practitioners and administrators. (shrink)

This entry considers the question “What is objectification?” After preliminary remarks about different methodological approaches, several possible answers, or groups of answers, are introduced, separated out in terms of broad themes. Each is situated in relation to historical and more contemporary authors. These themes are: objectification as instrumentalization; objectification as reduction to the body; objectification as negation of subjectivity or agency; objectification as naturalization. Objectification is considered in relation to both sexual and racial contexts. Finally, these themes are discussed in (...) relation to the wider category of “mind suppression,” and its relation to objectification in the familiar context of imagery. (shrink)

Humans have faced urgent crises over the past two years, and in the midst of those we still have the threat of climate change and other big, systemic problems facing our world. In this time of chaos and crisis, how do activists find the strength to carry on? In answer to this question, environmental philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore has assembled a collection of short essays that offer courage, hope, and even some laughter to the people who have for years (...) been working for environmental sanity and social justice. Earth's weary lovers, as Moore calls them, are tired, perplexed, and battered from all directions. Their hearts have so often been broken; it's hard to go on, but it is morally impossible to quit. To these weary activists, Moore brings encouragement to join or keep on with the struggle-not entertaining distractions, but deep and honest reasons to remember that the struggle matters, now and in the future. Moore's essays are matched with drawings by Canadian artist Bob Haverluck; together, they invite readers to take heart. Taking heart is not hope exactly, but maybe it's courage. Not reassurance, but reason to persevere. Not the promise of good results-it does not depend on winning odds-but a call to integrity. Not strength, but stubbornness, which might be just as good. Not solutions to the planetary crisis, but some modest advice for the inevitable crisis of the heart. Not good cheer entirely, but a chance to grin, and gladness to be part of this strange and necessary work for the endangered Earth. (shrink)

In an era of fake news, alternative truths and leaked secrets making constant headlines, we are telling stories about ourselves all the time, and we are telling them in so many different ways. From vlogs and blogs to tweets and posts, from photos and gifs to live streams. From instant updates that disappear to rash words that last for ever and data trails that chart every step we take. While people around her shake their heads and mutter bad things about (...) the new levels of day-to-day deceit, Kathleen Wyatt is busy marvelling at how society manages it. How do we do this extraordinary thing - often under the most ordinary of circumstances? How do we convince each other to suspend disbelief? And why do we do it? In this brilliant, wide-ranging study of lies and lying, Wyatt introduces us to a cast of professionals and professional liars - from scientists to investigators, from double agents to journalists, from toddler specialists to a fallen titan of industry - all to help her prove a remarkable thesis: lies hold us together as much as they push us apart and may be vital in a healthy society"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Feminist theory has enhanced and expanded the agency, influence, status and contributions of women throughout the globe. However, feminist critical analysis has not yet examined how the assumption that religion is natural, timeless, universal and omnipresent supports sexist and race based oppression. This book proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better comprehend and confront the systematic disempowerment of women and marginalized groups. Utilising feminist and post-colonial analysis of access, equity and violence, contributors draw on recent critical theory (...) to collapse accepted boundaries between religion and secularity with the aim of understanding that religion is a technology of governance in its function, meaning and history. The volume includes case studies focusing on how the category of religion is deployed to perpetuate male hegemony and racist inequities in Australia, Mexico, the United States, Britain and Canada. This trenchant feminist critique and academic analysis will be of key interest to scholars and students of Religion, Sociology, Political Science and Gender Studies. (shrink)

Scientists depend on complex computational systems that are often ineliminably opaque, to the detriment of our ability to give scientific explanations and detect artifacts. Some philosophers have s...

A popular approach to defining fictive utterance says that, necessarily, it is intended to produce imagining. I shall argue that this is not falsified by the fact that some fictive utterances are intended to be believed, or are non-accidentally true. That this is so becomes apparent given a proper understanding of the relation of what one imagines to one's belief set. In light of this understanding, I shall then argue that being intended to produce imagining is sufficient for fictive utterance (...) as well. (shrink)

The concept of a relational self has been prominent in feminism, communitarianism, narrative self theories, and social network theories, and has been important to theorizing about practical dimensions of selfhood. However, it has been largely ignored in traditional philosophical theories of personal identity, which have been dominated by psychological and animal theories of the self. This book offers a systematic treatment of the notion of the self as constituted by social, cultural, political, and biological relations. The author's account incorporates practical (...) concerns and addresses how a relational self has agency, autonomy, responsibility, and continuity through time in the face of change and impairments. This cumulative network model of the self incorporates concepts from work in the American pragmatist and naturalist tradition. The ultimate aim of the book is to bridge traditions that are often disconnected from one another--feminism, personal identity theory, and pragmatism--to develop a unified theory of the self. (shrink)

COVID-19 is a highly contagious infection with no proven treatment. Approximately 2.5% of patients need mechanical ventilation while their body fights the infection.1 Once COVID-19 patients reach the point of critical illness where ventilation is necessary, they tend to deteriorate quickly. During the pandemic, patients with other conditions may also present at the hospital needing emergency ventilation. But ventilation of a COVID-19 patient can last for 2–3 weeks. Accordingly, if all ventilators are in use, there will not be time for (...) patients to ‘queue up’ to wait for those who arrived earlier to recover. Those who need a ventilator will die if they do not receive access to one quickly. Many nations now face the prospect that they failed to prepare appropriately for this foreseen risk of pandemic (another issue worthy of legal analysis) and that their populations will need far more ventilators than the health service can supply. For many weeks, the UK has been anticipating a surge of COVID-19 infections that could leave patients queuing in hospitals for ICU care. Luckily, social distancing has ‘flattened the curve’ and this problem might not arise. There is still a degree of risk, however, and other countries will not be so lucky. At some point, during this pandemic or the next, all countries will need to answer hard questions about whether and when scarce ICU resources (such as ventilators, beds and staff) should be either withheld or withdrawn from certain groups of patients solely for the purpose of providing them to others. Attempts to answer these questions can be found in a wide range of ICU triage protocols and ethical guidance documents, many of which embrace the foundational principle of ‘save the most lives’. Unfortunately, this worthwhile goal has generated many suggestions that could violate the law. This article identifies …. (shrink)

This article examines the complaint that arbitrary algorithmic decisions wrong those whom they affect. It makes three contributions. First, it provides an analysis of what arbitrariness means in this context. Second, it argues that arbitrariness is not of moral concern except when special circumstances apply. However, when the same algorithm or different algorithms based on the same data are used in multiple contexts, a person may be arbitrarily excluded from a broad range of opportunities. The third contribution is to explain (...) why this systemic exclusion is of moral concern and to offer a solution to address it. (shrink)

Many Roman Catholic female saints have been virgin martyrs whose lives exemplify a feminine Christian ideal. This article examines the legend of the modern virgin martyr Maria Goretti, a spiritual template whose sainthood can be said to institutionalize violence by defining women as sexualized beings and potential rape victims. The social and psychological effects of the legend of Goretti are discussed as a form of spiritual and sexual terrorism.

As philosophers of mind we seem to hold in common no very clear view about the relevance that work in psychology or the neurosciences may or may not have to our own favourite questions—even if we call the subject ‘philosophical psychology’. For example, in the literature we find articles on pain some of which do, some of which don't, rely more or less heavily on, for example, the work of Melzack and Wall; the puzzle cases used so extensively in discussions (...) of personal identity are drawn sometimes from the pleasant exercise of scientific fantasy, at times from surprising reports of scientific fact; and there are those who deny, as well as those who affirm, the importance of the discovery of rapid-eye-movement sleep to the philosophical treatment of dreaming. A general account of the relation between scientific, and philosophical, psychology is long overdue and of the first importance. Here I shall limit myself to just one area where the two seem to connect, discussing one type of neuropsychological research and its relevance to questions in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

This empirical study examines corporate responses to activist shareholder groups filing social-policy shareholder resolutions. Using resource dependency theory as our conceptual framing, we identify some of the drivers of corporate responses to shareholder activists. This study departs from previous studies by including a fourth possible corporate response, engaging in dialogue. Dialogue, an alternative to shareholder resolutions filed by activists, is a process in which corporations and activist shareholder groups mutually agree to engage in ongoing negotiations to deal with social issues. (...) Based on a unique dataset of resolutions filed by member organizations of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility from 2002 to 2005 and the outcomes of these resolutions, our analysis finds that corporate managers are more likely to engage in dialogue with shareholder activists when the firm is larger, is more responsive to stakeholders, the CEO is the board chair, and the firm has a relatively lower percentage of institutional investors. (shrink)

In the first half of this book, I offer a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known, ‘fictional truth’.The theory of fictional content I argue for is ‘extreme intentionalism’. The basic idea – very roughly, in ways which are made precise in the book - is that the fictional content of a particular text is equivalent to exactly what the author of the text intended the reader to imagine. The second half of the book is concerned with (...) showing how extreme intentionalism and the lessons learnt from it can illuminate cognate questions in the philosophy of fiction and imagination. For instance, I argue, my position helps us to explain how fiction can provide us with reliable testimony ; it helps explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance ; and it fits with, and so supports, a persuasive theory of the nature of fiction itself. In my final chapter, I show how attending to intentionalist practices of interpreting fictional content can illuminate the nature of propositional imagining itself. (shrink)

La autora presenta una critica a la concepcion clasica de los sentidos asumida por la mayoria de autores naturalistas que pretenden explicar el contenido mental. Esta crítica se basa en datos neurobiologicos sobre los sentidos que apuntan a que estos no parecen describir caracteristicas objetivas del mundo, sino que actuan de forma ʼnarcisita', es decir, representan informacion en funcion de los intereses concretos del organismo.El articulo se encuentra también en: Bechtel, et al., Philosophy and the Neuroscience.

This paper attempts to get some critical distance on the increasingly fashionable issue of realism in political theory. Realism has an ambiguous status: it is sometimes presented as a radical challenge to the _status quo_; but it also often appears as a conservative force, aimed at clipping the wings of more ‘idealistic’ political theorists. I suggest that what we might call ‘actually existing realism’ is indeed a conservative presence in political philosophy, and that its ambiguous status plays a part in (...) making it so. But I also argue that there is no necessary connection between realism and conservatism. This paper describes the three contingent and suspiciously quick steps which lead from an initial commitment to being attentive to the real world, via a particular kind of pessimism about political possibilities, to an unnecessarily conservative destination. In the process, I try to show how the ubiquitous trinity of realism, pessimism and conservatism might be pulled apart, thus removing the artificial tension between ‘being realistic’ and the demand for far-reaching social change. (shrink)

This article explores the changing nature of twenty-first-century capitalism with an emphasis on illuminating the political coalitions and institutional conditions that support and sustain it. Most of the existing literature attributes the changing nature of the firm to developments in markets and technology. By contrast, this article emphasizes the political forces that have driven the transformation of the twentieth-century consolidated firm through the firm as a “network of contracts” and toward the platform firm. Moreover, situating the United States in a (...) comparative perspective highlights the distinctive ways US political-economic institutions have facilitated that transformation and exacerbated the associated inequalities. (shrink)

Being open to persuasion can help show respect for an interlocutor. At the same time, open-mindedness about morally objectionable claims can carry moral as well as epistemic risks. Our aim in this paper is to specify when there might be duty to be open to persuasion. We distinguish two possible interpretations of openness. First, openness might refer to a kind of mental state, wherein one is willing to revise or abandon present beliefs. Second, it might refer to a deliberative practice, (...) according to which one is willing to engage with opposing reasons. We suggest these two interpretations are conceptually and empirically distinct. Once disambiguated, we suggest that different contexts may make different forms of openness appropriate as expressions of respect. (shrink)

What is fiction? It permeates contemporary life: via novels we read, stories we tell, box-sets we watch, and as philosophers, thought experiments we use. Many think it should be characterised in terms of a relation to the imagination. In this essay, I’ll consider prominent expressions of this view, as well as rejections of it. Before this, I’ll introduce two methodological approaches that it’s helpful to distinguish.

Presentism, the thesis that only present events and objects exist and that past and future ones do not, maintains a following largely based on the argument that it is intuitively compatible with an everyday perception of time. This intuition is based on the present being the only time that feels it exists, and so is concluded that it is the only time that does. However this paper demonstrates that human time perception does not at all match a presentist account. Variability (...) in the experience of both flow rate and the specious present within subjects‟ conflicts with the view that time has a constant rate of flow and that the present has a constant „size‟. Variability between subjects; such as differences relating to age or circumstance contradict the idea of time as having any metaphysically universal size or rate of flow; constant or variable. It is thus concluded that one‟s perceptions and intuitive responses are not sufficient to support any metaphysical picture of the nature of time. (shrink)

The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce’s work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce’s theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of (...) visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce’s theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice’s philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Gathers fragments of the writings of early Greek philosophers, including Hesiod, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and Zeno.

Anonymity is a form of nonidentifiability which I define as noncoordinatability of traits in a given respect. This definition broadens the concept, freeing it from its primary association with naming. I analyze different ways anonymity can be realized. I also discuss some ethical issues, such as privacy, accountability and other values which anonymity may serve or undermine. My theory can also conceptualize anonymity in information systems where, for example, privacy and accountability are at issue.