Jane Austen’s Emma : Philosophical PerspectivesDADLEZE. M. oup. 2018. pp. xvi + 246. £19.99.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Full Collection of Personal NarrativesZohar Lederman, Ola Ziara, Rachel Coghlan, Oksana Sulaieva, Anna Shcherbakova, Oleksandr Dudin, Vladyslava Kachkovska, Iryna Dudchenko, Anna Kovchun, Lyudmyla Prystupa, Yuliya Nogovitsyna, Ghaiath Hussein, Kathryn Fausch, P. P. Kyaw, Ayesha Ahmad, Richard W Sams II, Handreen Mohammed Saeed, Artem Riga, Ryan C. Maves, Elizabeth Dotsenko, Irina Deyneka, Eva V. Regel, and Vita Voloshchuk• An Unsettling Affair• How We Keep Caring While Walking Through Our (...) Pain• Adjusting Laboratory Practices to the Challenges of Wartime• Why We Stay• A Semi-Personal Story from a Ukrainian NGO Professional (or a Semi-Professional Story from a Ukrainian Person) Living through the War• When Ethics Survives Where People Do Not: A Story From Darfur• Burma’s Healthcare Under Fire: My Experience as an Exiled Medical Professional• When a Conflict Collapses on a Child: An (Aborted) Medical Evacuation of a Hazara Toddler During the Kabul Airport Blast and the Taliban Takeover• The Vagaries and Vicissitudes of War• Providing Care to a Potential Aggressor: An Ethical Dilemma• One Surgeon’s Experience During Armed Conflict in Ukraine• The Limits of Our Obligations• A Liberating Breath• Soldiers of the Invisible Front: How Ukrainian Therapists Are Fighting for the Mental Health of the Nation Under Fire• Stories of Families with Chronically Ill Pediatric Patients during the War in UkraineCopyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Kant’s Construction of Nature marks a major milestone in Kant scholarship. Friedman draws on over thirty years of research to make Kant’s deep engagement with Newtonian natural science accessible, and shows its relevance to Kant’s critical philosophy, especially the Critique of Pure Reason. Friedman has benefited from other excellent scholarship on Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations, but no other scholar combines such detailed textual analysis and understanding of the issues with a systematic presentation of the whole and its connection to Kant’s critical (...) philosophy.The MF is an extreme distillation of Kant’s views on a complex set of topics, but Friedman writes exceptionally clearly, and includes.. (shrink)

The title of this paper proclaims its central interest—the relationship which holds between the concept of integrity and the concept of the identity of the self, or, for short, self-identity. Unreflective speech often suggests a close relationship between the two, but in the latter half of this century, notwithstanding one or two notable exceptions, they have been discussed with minimum cross-reference as if they belonged to two rather different philosophical menus which tended not to be available at the same restaurant (...) on the same night. My intention is to argue that our account of the one carried implications for the other and that this relationship is reflexive. My argument will proceed by stating and criticizing a common account of the relationship between each of these concepts which tends to offer mutual support for the implied account of each. Thereafter an alternative account will be outlined. (shrink)

It was, I believe, Thomas Arnold who wrote: ‘Educate men without religion and all you make of them is clever devils’. Thus the Headmaster of one famous school summarized pithily the view of the relationship between religion and ethics which informed educational theory and practice in this country for at least a further century. There is a confusion of two different assumptions usually to be found in this context. The first is that religious belief can provide an intellectual foundation for (...) moral belief; the second is that the effect of religious teaching is to improve behaviour according to the norms of some particular set of moral beliefs. (shrink)

The notion that eukaryotes are ancestrally sexual has been gaining attention. This idea comes in part from the discovery of sets of “meiosis‐specific genes” in the genomes of protists. The existence of these genes has persuaded many that these organisms may be engaging in sex, even though this has gone undetected. The involvement of sex in protists is supported by the view that asexual reproduction results in the accumulation of mutations that would inevitably result in the decline and extinction of (...) such lineages. It is argued that this phenomenon can be obviated by polyploidy and that the “meiosis‐specific genes” are used in other processes, including polyploidy control and homologous recombination, independent of meiosis. These phenomena account for the finding that these genes are expressed in cultures devoid of apparent cell fusion events. Hence, it is also proposed that asexual, and not sexual, reproduction is the ancestral condition. (shrink)

Concerns over the organising of food are widespread, stemming from unsustainable production practices that focus on extractive ‘use’ of resources that privilege wealth creation over planetary flourishing, care and well-being. We propose a conceptual framework based on _ecologies of care_ to assist in the re-entanglement of food systems. The concept of ecologies of care brings together theoretical understandings of relationality, ecology and care, along with an Aotearoa New Zealand indigenous Māori perspective. We examine how food production can be underpinned by (...) interdependent webs of relationships (whanaungatanga), stewardship (kaitiakitanga), and care and support (manaakitanga) with healthy land and healthy people at the core of organising. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted an increasing amount of attention, both positive and negative. Its potential applications in healthcare are indeed manifold and revolutionary, and within the realm of medical imaging and radiology (which will be the focus of this paper), significant increases in accuracy and speed, as well as significant savings in cost, stand to be gained through the adoption of this technology. Because of its novelty, a norm of keeping humans “in the loop” wherever AI mechanisms are deployed (...) has become synonymous with good ethical practice in some circles. It has been argued that keeping humans “in the loop” is important for reasons of safety, accountability, and the maintenance of institutional trust. However, as the application of machine learning for the detection of lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS) in this paper’s case study reveals, there are some scenarios where an insistence on keeping humans in the loop (or in other words, the resistance to automation) seems unwarranted and could possibly lead us to miss out on very real and important opportunities in healthcare—particularly in low-resource settings. It is important to acknowledge these opportunity costs of resisting automation in such contexts, where better options may be unavailable. Using an AI model based on convolutional neural networks developed by a team of researchers at NUH/NUS medical school in Singapore for automated detection and classification of the lumbar spinal canal, lateral recess, and neural foraminal narrowing in an MRI scan of the spine to diagnose LSS, we will aim to demonstrate that where certain criteria hold (e.g., the AI is as accurate or better than human experts, risks are low in the event of an error, the gain in wellbeing is significant, and the task being automated is not essentially or importantly human), it is both morally permissible and even desirable to kick the humans out of the loop. (shrink)

Through an analysis of personal histories, we reflect on changes in disability discourses in educational contexts since the 1970s. We argue that educational systems are deeply resistant to critical discourse of disability even while espousing social justice principles. We simultaneously recognize the disconnection between disability, education, and the lived experiences of disabled children, and the way in which their experiences are framed. We call for a more integrated discourse between academic theories of disability, professional systems, and children’s lived experiences in (...) order to better care for children and their families, and to address injustice in education systems. (shrink)

In Moral Passages, Kathryn Pyne Addelson presents an original moral theory suited for contemporary life and its moral problems. Her basic principle is that knowledge and morality are generated in collective action, and she develops it through a critical examination of theories in philosophy, sociology and women's studies, most of which hide the collective nature and as a result hide the lives and knowledge of many people. At issue are the questions of what morality is, and how moral theories (...) (whether traditional or feminist) are implemented. Addelson takes up a large number of historical cases and contemporary social problems, including teen pregnancy, contraception and abortion, and gay rights. These cases allow her to see how the knowledge and lives of some people are declared deviant or immoral, while those of others appear to show the public consensus. One case she uses throughout the book is Margaret Sanger's early work on birth control with the anarcho-syndicalist movement--a revisionist history that reveals rather than hides the collective nature of morality and knowledge. Addelson shows how the usual individualist philosophies promote theories which hide the authority of the professionals who make them. A collectivist approach, she argues, must show the part professionals play in collective action. Her aim is to allow professional knowledge makers to be morally and intellectually responsible. Based on Addelson's twenty years of work in feminist philosophy and interactionist sociology as well as her long-standing involvement in women's community organization, Moral Passages investigates how morality and knowledge are collectively enacted in today's world. (shrink)

It is only fair to hold someone accountable for outcomes over which they have sufficient control. The evidence-based approach to education (“evidence-based education,” or EBE) promises to give educators sufficient control over their students’ outcomes by providing access to interventions that are effective according to scientific research. I argue that EBE fails to secure sufficient control because the research on which it relies doesn't establish that interventions are generally effective. If they are to be fair, accountability practices must reflect the (...) limited control educators have, even when using evidence-based interventions that have improved outcomes in other settings. I glean relevant insights by considering accountability for medical practitioners within the context of evidence-based medicine (EBM). (shrink)

The article “Revive and Refuse: Capacity, Autonomy, and Refusal of Care After Opioid Overdose,” Marshall et al. (2024) highlights the critical issue of care after an opioid overdose. “Revive and Re...

The Anthropocene marks a moment of wild destratification of the planet that requires analysis of the relations between geologic forces and social practices. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of strata is examined in order to develop a geophilosophy for the Anthropocene. Establishing a model of strata that conjoins earth and social flows together into planes of interrelated production highlights how the fossil substratum subtends contemporary forms of social relations. Stratifications, it is argued, are planes of social reproduction that both constrain and (...) are expressive of possible modes of expression. If power, according to Foucault, is a relation between forces, geosocial strata conceptualizes how stratifications organize and capture forces into political geology. Concentrating on diagramming moments of crossing strata, it is suggested that Anthropocene geopolitics needs to be located at the intersection of geosocial formations and processes of fossilization, rather than through a new assemblage of planetary scale. (shrink)

The increasing complexity of human subjects research and its oversight has prompted researchers, as well as institutional review boards, to have a forum in which to discuss challenging or novel ethical issues not fully addressed by regulations. Research ethics consultation services provide such a forum. In this article, we rely on the experiences of a national Research Ethics Consultation Collaborative that collected more than 350 research ethics consultations in a repository and published 18 challenging cases with accompanying ethical commentaries to (...) highlight four contexts in which REC can be a valuable resource. REC assists: 1) investigators before and after the regulatory review; 2) investigators, IRBs, and other research administrators facing challenging and novel ethical issues; 3) IRBs and investigators with the increasing challenges of informed consent and risk/benefit analysis; and 4) in providing flexible and collaborative assistance to overcome study hurdles, mediate conflicts within a team, or directly engage with research participants. Institutions that have established, or plan to establish, REC services should work to raise the visibility of their service and engage in open communication with existing clinical ethics consult services as well as the IRB. While the IRB system remains the foundation for the ethical review of research, REC can be a valuable service for investigators, regulators, and research participants aligned with the goal of supporting ethical research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Queer Coal:Genealogies in/of the BloodKathryn YusoffIntroductionAn inhuman equationA genealogical account of coal ± a solar line of descentSolar -/- plant -/- coal ≤ plant minor/miner ≠ bloodlineFossil fuels are dark and patient and have a history that is in/of the blood. Fossil fuels are pockets of sunshine that have a solar line of descent. Fossil fuels are a chemical “blood knowledge” (Cixous 1991, 103) that coheres at the seam, (...) coal face, plant, and picket line.A genealogical account of coal in the Anthropocene must go in two directions: into the specificities of bodies, sites, and political formations in which coal comes to matter and through inhuman agency and its continuance notwithstanding the human (as if the human, like Bataille has claimed, is a roundabout for energy, a mere diversion of the forces of the cosmos). If the global claim for geologic force in the Anthropocene is realised through the liberation of vast standing stocks of fossil fuels by major powers, then slicing through Anthropocenic monumentality requires a deliberately minor/miner cut, which is made here through underground passages, sexual politics, and queer solidarities to explore the inter-implications of substances and subjects in coal mining; explicitly, mining is considered as an aesthetics, method, and epistemology that elaborates on an inhuman sociality of the blood; it is a sociality whose passages are specifically located within the 1984–85 miners’ strike in Britain. I focus on these minor (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) stories of solidarity and violence amidst the broader landscape of coal as a defining social materiality in political, judicial, and class powers. While Anthropocenic [End Page 203] discourses claim a global instantiation on behalf of humanity, the planet, and the species-being, this blood knowledge of coal can be considered as an instantiation or a fleshy reminder of the geontological forces of black rocks and their inheritances; what René Char called “its reality of earth, its matter-emotion” (Char quoted in Blanchot 1995, 108) in the corporeal impregnation of an incorporeal universe. In these messy personal-political subjectivities that are entangled with fossil fuels, something might be said about how to begin to apprehend the geontological coordinates of the Anthropocene and the possible forms of sociality that the inhuman enacts (and incites) in ways that eschew its universalising claims.In this process of joining coal to its somewhat unexpected sociopolitical formations—in terms of queer and minoritarian support for the British coal miners—I want to say something about a biopolitics that is subtended by geology (and this is why there is/and will be/blood). This is a biopolitics that moves away from the governance of life and death into a consideration of how the geosocial formations of fossil fuels constitute the very possibilities for certain types of social, sexual, political, and labor arrangements. To study the geosocial matrix as it pertains to both power and possibility is not to add the geologic (or inhuman) as a supplement to an already existing biopolitical conceptualization. Rather, it is to register that the geologic is a mode of material expression that is already active within these formations, yet often bracketed out, and its political potential as a dynamic power within socialities, underplayed. Such an understanding of the permeable materiality of fossil fuels might just bear on the reconceptualization of the Anthropocene as an epoch characterized by a differentiated corporeal geology of/in the blood, rather than as a universal stratigraphic trace in some future geologic record.Against the Promethean trust of the Anthropocene, I follow Hélène Cixous’s dream in The Book of Promethea of “writing fire in the fire” (Cixous 1991, 134); an account made in proximity to the desirous intersection of experience. Such a mode of feminist geophilosophy seeks out the form of the underground—the underground as a way of being or a “thing state” (Lispector 2014, 109)—closing the gap between writing and being written. What follows is a fragmented genealogy that begins in the general conditions of inhuman matter and ends up in the specifics of the British coal mining strike in the 1980s. First, some mining methodology and Anthropocene drill sites.Some Drill Sites... (shrink)

As environments and their inhabitants undergo a multitude of abrupt changes due to climate, in the aesthetic field there has been a hardening of a few representational figures that stand in for those contested political ecologies. Biodiversity loss and habitat change can be seen to be forcing an acceleration of archival practices that mobilize various images of the ‘play of the world’, including the making of star species to represent planetary loss, and the consolidation of other species into archives implicitly (...) organized around the category of their destruction. The first section of this article looks at Jacques Rancière’s concept of political aesthetics in order to extend an argument about the importance of aesthetics in multispecies living beyond a concentration on practices per se and into a more excessive engagement articulated by Georges Bataille. I argue that aesthetics must be considered as part of the practice of politics and a space that configures the realm of what is possible in that politics. This is to suggest aesthetics as a form of ethics or an ‘aesthetics of existence’, as Foucault put it. The conclusion considers how a biopolitical aesthetic comes into being through such archival practices, and asks what aesthetic shifts would make the ‘play of the world’ more present in its absences. (shrink)

There is conflicting experimental evidence about whether the “stakes” or importance of being wrong affect judgments about whether a subject knows a proposition. To date, judgments about stakes effects on knowledge have been investigated using binary paradigms: responses to “low” stakes cases are compared with responses to “high stakes” cases. However, stakes or importance are not binary properties—they are scalar: whether a situation is “high” or “low” stakes is a matter of degree. So far, no experimental work has investigated the (...) scalar nature of stakes effects on knowledge: do stakes effects increase as the stakes get higher? Do stakes effects only appear once a certain threshold of stakes has been crossed? Does the effect plateau at a certain point? To address these questions, we conducted experiments that probe for the scalarity of stakes effects using several experimental approaches. We found evidence of scalar stakes effects using an “evidence seeking” experimental design, but no evidence of scalar effects using a traditional “evidence-fixed” experimental design. In addition, using the evidence-seeking design, we uncovered a large, but previously unnoticed framing effect on whether participants are skeptical about whether someone can know something, no matter how much evidence they have. The rate of skeptical responses and the rate at which participants were willing to attribute “lazy knowledge”—that someone can know something without having to check—were themselves subject to a stakes effect: participants were more skeptical when the stakes were higher, and more prone to attribute lazy knowledge when the stakes were lower. We argue that the novel skeptical stakes effect provides resources to respond to criticisms of the evidence-seeking approach that argue that it does not target knowledge. (shrink)