The moral distress of psychologists working in psychiatric and mental health care settings was explored in an interdisciplinary, hermeneutic phenomenological study situated at the University of Alberta, Canada. Moral distress is the state experienced when moral choices and actions are thwarted by constraints. Psychologists described specific incidents in which they felt their integrity had been compromised by such factors as institutional and interinstitutional demands, team conflicts, and interdisciplinary disputes. They described dealing with the resulting moral distress by such means as (...) silence, taking a stance, acting secretively, sustaining themselves through work with clients, seeking support from colleagues, and exiting. Recognizing moral distress can lead to a significant shift in the way we perceive moral choices and understand the moral context of practice. (shrink)

Experiences of moral distress encountered in psychiatric practice were explored in a hermeneutic phenomenological study. Moral distress is the state experienced when moral choices and actions are thwarted by constraints. Psychiatrists describe struggling ‘to do the right thing’ for individual patients within a societal system that places unrealistic demands on psychiatric expertise. Certainty on the part of the psychiatrist is an expectation when judgments of dangerousness and/or the need for coercive treatments are made. This assumption, however, ignores the uncertainty and (...) complexity of reality. Society entrusts psychiatrists to care for and treat those among its most vulnerable members: persons deemed to have a severely diminished capacity for autonomy due to a mental disorder. Simultaneously, psychiatrists are held accountable by society for the protection of the public. Moral distress arose for psychiatrists in their efforts to fulfill both roles. They described an ‘outsider/insider’ status and the ways in which they attempted to cope with moral distress. (shrink)

One of the main strategies against conceivability arguments is the so-called phenomenal concept strategy, which aims to explain the epistemic gap between physical and phenomenal truths in terms of the special features of phenomenal concepts. Daniel Stoljar has recently argued that the phenomenal concept strategy has failed to provide a successful explanation of this epistemic gap. In this paper my aim is to defend the phenomenal concept strategy from his criticisms. I argue that Stoljar has misrepresented the resources of the (...) strategy, which can indeed accomplish the required explanatory task, once it is properly understood. (shrink)

In this article ideas from Kit Fine’s theory of arbitrary objects are applied to questions regarding mathematical structuralism. I discuss how sui generis mathematical structures can be viewed as generic systems of mathematical objects, where mathematical objects are conceived of as arbitrary objects in Fine’s sense.

The inference from conceivability to possibility has been challenged in numerous ways. One of these ways is the so-called phenomenal concept strategy, which has become one of the main strategies against the conceivability argument against physicalism. However, David Chalmers has recently presented a dilemma for the phenomenal concept strategy, and he has argued that no version of the strategy can succeed. In this paper, I examine the dilemma, and I argue that there is a way out of it. I conclude (...) that Chalmers has not posed any serious problem for the phenomenal concept strategy to succeed in blocking the conceivability argument. In doing so, my aim is not only to show that Chalmers’s argument has not refuted the phenomenal concept strategy, but also to clarify what any version of the strategy should achieve in order to be successful. (shrink)

v. 1. Testo italiano, note, documenti -- v. 2. Versão portuguesa, bibliografia.

The difficulties with formalizing the intensional notions necessity, knowability and omniscience, and rational belief are well-known. If these notions are formalized as predicates applying to (codes of) sentences, then from apparently weak and uncontroversial logical principles governing these notions, outright contradictions can be derived. Tense logic is one of the best understood and most extensively developed branches of intensional logic. In tense logic, the temporal notions future and past are formalized as sentential operators rather than as predicates. The question therefore (...) arises whether the notions that are investigated in tense logic can be consistently formalized as predicates. In this paper it is shown that the answer to this question is negative. The logical treatment of the notions of future and past as predicates gives rise to paradoxes due the specific interplay between both notions. For this reason, the tense paradoxes that will be presented are not identical to the paradoxes referred to above. (shrink)

El presente ensayo explora el itinerario de la crítica que Nietzsche ejerció sobre el arte de Wagner en tres pasos. Primero, se trata de reconocer la juvenil admiración del filósofo por la ópera wagneriana entendida como un renacimiento del drama musical antiguo. Luego, se explora el tránsito hacia su desilusión en la clave de la influencia de Schopenhauer sobre Wagner. Finalmente, el ensayo remata en la crítica madura de Nietzsche sobre Wagner, donde se advierten los prolegómenos decimonónicos de la transformación (...) general del arte en espectáculo en el sentido contemporáneo. (shrink)

Modifying a contrast introduced by Dixon, Stephen Mumford distinguishes between ‘partisan’ and ‘purist’ ways of watching sport. Recognising that the extreme partisan and extreme purist positions do not explain the nature of sports spectatorship, Mumford follows Dixon in adopting the idea of moderate partisanship. He outlines three theories of spectatorship designed to address the issue of the relationship between the partisan and the purist ways of viewing sport. The true perception theory regards the moderate fan as able to see the (...) event as it really is, rather than concentrating on an aspect. The mixture theory is the view that ‘the moderate partisan has both partisan and purist perceptions of sport in some mixed way’. The oscillation theory, which Mumford favours, holds that the moderate sports fan switches or oscillates between competitive and aesthetic ways of watching sport... (shrink)

Excerpt from La Théorie Platonicienne des Idées Et des Nombres d'Après Aristote: Étude Historique Et Critique La théorie phtonioionno de l'amour. Vol. Ia-8 de la Collection historique des grands philosophes 3 fr. 75. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the (...) aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

We critically discuss Cleland''s analysis of effective procedures as mundane effective procedures. She argues that Turing machines cannot carry out mundane procedures, since Turing machines are abstract entities and therefore cannot generate the causal processes that are generated by mundane procedures. We argue that if Turing machines cannot enter the physical world, then it is hard to see how Cleland''s mundane procedures can enter the world of numbers. Hence her arguments against versions of the Church-Turing thesis for number theoretic functions (...) miss the mark. (shrink)

Contemporary theological anthropology is now almost united in its opposition toward concepts of the abstract individual. Instead there is a strong preference for concrete concepts, which locate individual human being in historically and socioculturally contingent contexts. In this paper I identify, and discuss in detail, three key themes that structure recent theological opposition to abstract concepts of the individual: (1) the idea that individual human beings are constituted in part by their relations with their environments, with other human beings, and (...) with God; (2) the idea that individual human beings are unique entities; (3) the idea that individual human beings cannot be conceptualized in atemporal terms. Subsequently, I seek to demonstrate that theories of embodied cognition offer broad, if not unconditional, support for the concept of the concrete individual. As such, I suggest, theories of embodied cognition provide a valuable resource for dialogue between contemporary science and theological anthropology. (shrink)

The chief aim of the paper is to extend the calculusDSC 1 (see [4]) in such a way as to satisfy all the requirements listed in [4] as well as a further stipulation — called the principle of uninvolvement — to the effect that neither deontic compatibility nor deontic incompatibility of codes (see [2]) should be presupposed in deontic logic.

In most mental health professions, confidentiality is probably the most important ethical principle in psychology, aside from nonmalfeasance. However, confidentiality is embedded in the Western values of individuality and autonomy. This creates a moral and ethical dilemma for clinicians working with clients from other cultures. This article presents 3 cases to highlight the conflict that many clinicians are likely to face with regard to confidentiality when working with clients from South Asia and similar cultures. The importance of understanding how cultural (...) values may contradict professional ethics and some ways in which the clinician can address them are also discussed. (shrink)