Philosophy as a way of life -- Becoming an individual -- Humanism : for and against -- Authenticity -- A chastened individualism? Existentialism and social thought -- Existentialism in the twenty-first century.

Deliberative democracy entails a commitment to deciding political questions on their merits. To that end, people engage in an exchange of reasons in a shared endeavour to arrive at the right answer or the best judgement they can make in the circumstances. Of course, in practice a shared judgement may be impossible to reach. Yet while compromise may seem a natural way of dealing with the disagreement that deliberation leaves unresolved – for example, some deliberative theorists argue that a willingness (...) to compromise manifests respect for the considered views of others, even as we continue to disagree with them – the relationship between deliberation and compromise is not as straightforward as one might think. To explain why, this paper contrasts conflicts of judgement with conflicts of preference, interest and value to show why greater attention needs to be paid to the character of the decision to be made. (shrink)

Since the early 1970s, internal power sharing has remained central to the attempt to reach a political settlement on the constitutional structures for governing Northern Ireland. Even in the face o...

Although the idea of the public interest features prominently in many accounts of deliberative democracy, the relationship between deliberative democracy and the public interest is rarely spelt out with any degree of precision. In this article, I identify and defend one particular way of framing this relationship. I begin by arguing that people can deliberate about the public interest only if the public interest is, in principle, identifiable independently of their deliberations. Of course, some pluralists claim that the public interest (...) is an implausible idea, which casts doubt on the idea that there might be something for people to deliberate about. Yet while, following Brian Barry, we can get around this problem by defining the public interest as an interest in which everyone shares qua member of the public, what still needs to be explained is why people should be prepared to privilege this particular capacity. I argue that the account of political equality with which deliberative democracy is bound up offers a compelling explanation of this sort, even if it also gives rise to some difficult questions of feasibility. I conclude by considering the charge that any political scheme that framed the relationship between deliberative democracy and the public interest in this way would be undesirable. (shrink)

Sample quotes from emails sent by visitors to Mary Klages's successful literary theory web pages on which this book is based: 'Finding your course was a godsend ...

In the Philippines, all transplant centers are mandated by the Department of Health (DOH) to have a Hospital Transplant Ethics Committee (HTEC) to ensure that donations are altruistic, voluntary and free of coercion/commercial transactions. This study was undertaken primarily to describe the organizational and functional profile of existing HTECs and identify areas for improvement. This is a descriptive cross‐sectional study. There was variation in their logistical arrangements (support from hospital, filing systems, office spaces), operations (length and frequency of meetings, number (...) of referrals) and membership (composition, qualifications, occupation, training). The approval rate for donor‐recipient pairs is high with the majority of cases made by living non‐related donors. Appropriate reasons were cited for rejection. The perception of HTECs is that they are competent and confident in their decision‐making. However, there is a need to standardize HTEC composition, provide operating procedures and additional training which can be done by the DOH. (shrink)

En quoi consiste, ou devrait consister, l'éthique professionnelle en enseignement? Comment se manifeste-t- elle dans les gestes pédagogiques? Selon quels critères peut-on la juger? Comment développer l'éthique professionnelle dans le cadre des formations initiale et continue en enseignement? En tenant compte du contexte social et culturel du Québec, des principes éthiques déjà énoncés par le ministère de l'Education ainsi que des lois, codes et conventions ayant des incidences sur la pratique enseignante, les auteures présentent des éléments à considérer pour la (...) réflexion éthique sur l'agir professionnel. Elles proposent des clarifications conceptuelles et un certain nombre de repères et de balises afin de guider les enseignants et de stimuler la discussion sur l'éthique professionnelle, non seulement dans la classe, mais aussi dans l'école et dans la société. (shrink)

The present study examined whether strategy moderated the relationship between visuospatial perspective-taking and empathy. Participants undertook both a perspective-taking task requiring speeded spatial judgements made from the perspective of an observed figure and the Empathy Quotient questionnaire, a measure of trait empathy. Perspective-taking performance was found to be related to empathy in that more empathic individuals showed facilitated performance particularly for figures sharing their own spatial orientation. This relationship was restricted to participants that reported perspective-taking by mentally transforming their spatial (...) orientation to align with that of the figure; it was absent in those adopting an alternative strategy of transposing left and right whenever confronted with a front-view figure. Our finding that strategy moderates the relationship between empathy and visuospatial perspective-taking enables a reconciliation of the apparently inconclusive findings of previous studies and provides evidence for functionally dissociable empathic and non-empathic routes to visuospatial perspective-taking. (shrink)

In this essay I contrast Kant and Hegel on the so-called right of necessity, or distress. The contrast is significant because it summarizes succinctly the difference between their respective philosophies of right. Furthermore, I take the difference to indicate what in Hegel’s philosophy of right makes it preferable to Kant’s. In sum, the issue between the two is whether or not the concept of justice is determined in part by what I term in the paper the vicissitudes of making a (...) worthwhile living. (shrink)

This article briefly reviews concerns related to the “cultural colonialism” of applying Western biomedical models of research ethics to non-Western groups. The feasibility of alternate ethical models is discussed and found wanting. In practical terms, many academic researchers in the United States are funded by federal agencies and are required to adhere to Title 45, Part 46 of the Code of Federal Regulations , legislation that is clearly grounded in the Western biomedical research tradition. Consequently, the question is not whether (...) this system of ethics should be applied but rather how it can be applied most sensitively, appropriately, and wisely. The remainder of this article discusses of how the authors have attempted to do so in each stage of their own research with Hispanic immigrants to the United States. (shrink)

How is hope to be found amid the ethical and political dilemmas of modern life? Writer and philosopher Mary Zournazi brought her questions to some of the most thoughtful intellectuals at work today. She discusses "joyful revolt" with Julia Kristeva, the idea of "the rest of the world" with Gayatri Spivak, the "art of living" with Michel Serres, the "carnival of the senses" with Michael Taussig, the relation of hope to passion and to politics with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. (...) A dozen stimulating minds weigh in with their visions of a better social and political order. The result is a collaboration - of writing, of thinking, and of politics - that demonstrates more clearly than any single-authored project could how ideas encountering one another can produce the vision needed for social change. (shrink)

The central concept in modern democratic theory outlined by a well-respected authority.

(2012). Introduction: The value and limits of rights: essays in honour of Peter Jones. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 15, The Value and Limits of Rights: Essays in Honour of Peter Jones, pp. 387-394. doi: 10.1080/13698230.2012.699394.

Since the early 1970s, internal power sharing has remained central to the attempt to reach a political settlement on the constitutional structures for governing Northern Ireland. Even in the face o...

"Charming, interesting, thought-provoking and a great read." Rosalind Hursthouse The daughter of a pacifist rector who answered "No!" when his congregation asked him "Is everything in the bible true?", perhaps Mary Midgley was destined to become a philosopher. Yet few would have thought this inquisitive, untidy, nature-loving child would become "one of the sharpest critical pens in the west." This is her remarkable story. Probably the only philosopher to have been in Vienna on the eve of its invasion by Nazi (...) Germany in 1938 and dance in Trafalgar Square on VE day seven year later, she studied philosophy at Oxford in the same year as Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, all of whom became close friends. Midgley tells us in vivid and humorous fashion how they cut a swathe through the arid landscape of 1950s British philosophy, writing and arguing - often with each other - about the grand themes of character, beauty and the meaning of rudeness while the spectral figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein hovered in the background. She also charts the highs and lows of philosophy and academia in Britain. On joining the Reading philosophy department on £400 a year in 1949, she doubled its staff complement. But her many years at Newcastle University - where Mike Brearley, who later captained England at cricket, also used to teach - were rewarded with the closure of the philosophy department in the 1980s. The mother of three children, her journey is also one of a woman who in the 1950s and 1960s was fighting to combine a professional career with raising a family. In startling contrast to many of the academic stars of her generation, we learn that Midgley nearly became a novelist and started writing philosophy only when in her fifties, suggesting that Minerva's owl really does fly at dusk. Plainly told like her philosophy, this is an elegiac and moving account of friendships found and lost, bitter philosophical battles and of a profound love of teaching all too rarely acknowledged today. (shrink)

Plato famously promised to complement the Sophist and the Statesman with another work on a third sort of expert, the philosopher--but we do not have this final dialogue. Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher, but did not write it, in order to stimulate his audience and encourage his readers to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato's investigation of (...) knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, the second part of which presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. Gill contends that the dialogues leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher's method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato's philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato's exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between compromise and fairness, and considers in particular why, if a fair outcome to a conflict is available, the conflict should still be subject to compromise. It sets out the defining features of compromise and explains how fair compromise differs from both principled and pragmatic compromise. The fairness relating to compromise can be of two types: procedural or end-state. It is the coherence of end-state fairness with compromise that proves the more puzzling case. We offer (...) reasons why people should be allowed to resolve conflicting or competing claims through compromise, even if compromise comes at the expense of end-state fairness, but we resist the suggestion that the primary rationale for compromise is to be found in non-ideal circumstances. (shrink)

What is implied by "ethics of history"? The authors of this volume, internationally renowned philosophers and intellectual historians, address this question in all its novelty and ambiguity and develop varied perspectives on the place and nature of ethics in the philosophy, enterprise, and practice of history. Is the whole historical process--largely consisting of the actions and sufferings of persons and groups--subject to ethical constraint? And what of the ways in which historians present their subject matter; are these methods subject to (...) moral scrutiny? Although they approach these issues from different directions, the contributors agree in their critique of the correspondence theory of history, tin their acceptance of an unbridgeable gap between the past and the historian's present account, and in their call for a revision of the popular appeal to historical objectivity. (shrink)

Historically, Judeo-Christian doctrine has been used to justify the mistreatment of nonhuman animals through the “dominion” view of human superiority. Linzey and others have questioned this perspective, suggesting that critical tenets of religion, and particularly Christianity, support the ethical treatment of other animals by defining dominion as stewardship. This article considers how framing and networks help explain the complex relationship between religion and support for animal rights. We offer ways in which social networks and framing might inform the beliefs and (...) behaviors of religious individuals who support animal rights as well as the strategies of the animal rights movement intended to appeal to such individuals. (shrink)

A leader in the modern commentary on ethics and philosophy, Mary Warnock casts a critical eye over her life and times.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Narrative Symposium:Living Organ DonationLaura Altobelli, Sherri Bauman, Janice Flynn, Andy Heath, Joseph Jacobs, Tim Joos, Amy K. Lewensten, Donna L. Luebke, Sarah A. McDaniel, Donald Olenick, Laurie E Post, Vicky Young, Blake Adams, Anonymous One, Michael Sauls, Christine Wright, Shannon D. Wyatt, and Cara Yesawich• An Altruistic Living Donor’s Story• Surgery for the Soul• Kidney Donation Story• The Essence of Giving—A Transplant Story• Love—the Risk Worth Taking• My (...) Donation Journey• A Life For A Life: My Gift To My Dad• Lessons Learned: The Realities of Living Organ Donation• Sarah’s List Exchange Experience• Accelerated Living Donation• Liver Donor Nightmare• Adrift After Donation• Getting Our Child Off Dialysis• A Living Donor’s Journey• The Spare Kidney• Living Donors are People Too• The Gift of Life—Walking by Faith• Journey of an Altruistic, Non–designated Living DonorCopyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)