Milton Ohata reviews Roberto Schwarz’s Seqüências Brasileiras [Brazilian Episodes]. After the important pamphlet Duas meninas [Two Girls] , Roberto Schwarz returns to the scene with Seqüências Brasileiras, which brings together writings published from 1988-1998. His essays, enemies of preestablished hierarchies, unashamed before mythologies and fashions — always explosive, though discreet — tend to risk untravelled roads, passing by the techniques and fashions common among specialists.

Milton Ohata reviews Luiz Felipe de Alencastro’s O trato dos viventes: Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul [Mortal Traffic: The Formation of Brazil in the South Atlantic]. O trato dos viventes begins from a simple but consequential premise: that in the history of Portuguese America, the whole is not the sum of its parts; that is, it cannot be understood by merely combining the histories of its various regimes. Rather, local history is to be interpreted in the light of (...) its effective connections, in reciprocal determination, with the history of capitalism — in which the slave trade played an indispensible part. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

Using various meanings of ?visit? and ?friend? this essay freely explores connections between Milton's cultivation of fame in Europe, leading to reports in the early lives of visits of scholarly foreigners to his door, and the extraordinary concentration on scenarios of human and divine visitation in the late poems. Social, political and religious strands are followed, from humanist self-presentation in the sonnets through to prophetic isolation in the late poems. Codes of friendship are rehearsed concerning confidentiality and betrayal, and (...) attention is paid to the effect of blindness on the activities of the humanist writer, the need for supporting visits, and an increasing interiority and preoccupation with the responsibilities of those engaged with God's special causes. The proto-humanist visit of Raphael to Adam in Paradise Lost and the many guiding visitations in that poem are contrasted with the situation in Samson Agonistes, where divine guidance is presented as clearer in the past than the present, and the reader is invited to share difficulties of discernment in the Restoration world, prefigured in Judges. The essay ends with the simultaneous publication of Milton's humanist legacy and sale of many of his foreign-language books. (shrink)

_An Introduction to the History of Educational Theories_, first published in 1881, offers a comprehensive overview of the most notable approaches to education throughout Western history, from Athens and Rome to the Victorian public school. Exploring not only the still famous theories of Plato and Aristotle, this work also touches on techniques in education which are either no longer prevalent – Roman Oratory, the Jesuits – or in some cases were never widely adopted or appreciated: John Milton, for example. (...) This title will be of value to those intrigued by the potential of past attitudes for present-day application, as well as to those unconvinced by contemporary approaches. (shrink)

Integrating personality, behavioral, and cognitive theories of change, the author examines the operations, measurement, and evolution of behavioral and ethical standards that distinguish capitalism from other ideologies.

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization? Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an (...) exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity. (shrink)

Professor Brown describes and criticises the major classical model of rationality and offers a new model of this central concept in the history of philosophy and of science.

Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative ought judgments bring (...) with them a commitment to act in accordance with those judgments. Instead, I propose an alternative account of our normative concepts according to which only ought simpliciter judgments commit one to acting in accordance with those judgments. In addition to answering the sceptical challenge, the proposal offers an independently motivated account of what makes a concept normatively authoritative. (shrink)

The recent philosophy of Quantum Bayesianism, or QBism, represents an attempt to solve the traditional puzzles in the foundations of quantum theory by denying the objective reality of the quantum state. Einstein had hoped to remove the spectre of nonlocality in the theory by also assigning an epistemic status to the quantum state, but his version of this doctrine was recently proved to be inconsistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics. In this essay, I present plausibility arguments, old and new, (...) for the reality of the quantum state, and expose what I think are weaknesses in QBism as a philosophy of science. (shrink)

There is not, of course, a one-to-one relation between policy conclusions and the conclusions of positive economics; if there were, there would be no ...

Everyone appreciates a clever mathematical picture, but the prevailing attitude is one of scepticism: diagrams, illustrations, and pictures prove nothing; they are psychologically important and heuristically useful, but only a traditional verbal/symbolic proof provides genuine evidence for a purported theorem. Like some other recent writers (Barwise and Etchemendy [1991]; Shin [1994]; and Giaquinto [1994]) I take a different view and argue, from historical considerations and some striking examples, for a positive evidential role for pictures in mathematics.

Algorithms wield increasing control over our lives—over which jobs we get, whether we're granted loans, what information we're exposed to online, and so on. Algorithms can, and often do, wield their power in a biased way, and much work has been devoted to algorithmic bias. In contrast, algorithmic neutrality has gone largely neglected. I investigate three questions about algorithmic neutrality: What is it? Is it possible? And when we have it in mind, what can we learn about algorithmic bias?

You want to see the concert, but don’t want to take a long drive (even though the concert is far away). Such *strongly conflicting desire ascriptions* are, I show, wrongly predicted incompatible by standard semantics. I then object to possible solutions, and give my own, based on *some-things-considered desire*. Considering the fun of the concert, but ignoring the drive, you want to see the concert; considering the boredom of the drive, but ignoring the concert, you don’t want to take the (...) drive. (shrink)

The conditions of transport and slaughter at the end of their lives are a major challenge to the welfare of agricultural animals. • End-of-life experiences should be of a greater ethical concern than others of similar intensity and duration, due to their position in the animal’s life. • End-of-life welfare can have both internal importance to the animals and external ethical importance to human decision-makers. • We should pay extra care to ensure that the conditions during transport and slaughter are (...) as positive as possible. (shrink)

Fully updated and revised, this contemporary classic discusses the powerful moral issues facing corporate America: conflicts of interest, payoffs, trade secrets, insider trading, product safety and product liability, hiring, drug testing, sexual harassment, diversity, reverse discrimination, employee productivity monitoring, Internet/computer privacy, worker safety, whistle-blowing, ethical decision-making, ethical accounting and advertising practices, environmental responsibility, down-sizing, and the conduct of multinational corporations. These are just some of the many topics raised in this versatile text. Enhanced by many new case studies, questions for (...) discussion, and valuable bibliographies, Business Ethics focuses on the issues that will confront decision-makers well into the new century. (shrink)

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle examines the nature of happiness, which he defines as a specially good kind of life. He considers the nature of practical reasoning, friendship, and the role and importance of the moral virtues in the best life. This new edition features a revised translation and valuable new introduction and notes.

This paper examines the general prospects for conceptual role expressivism, expressivist theories that embrace conceptual role semantics. It has two main aims. The first aim is to provide a general characterisation of the view. The second aim is to raise a challenge for the general view. The challenge is to explain why normative concepts are not a species of defective concepts, where defective concepts are those that cannot meaningfully embed and participate in genuine inference. After rejecting existing attempts to answer (...) the challenge, I propose an alternative solution. However, the solution leaves conceptual role expressivism a far less distinctive and interesting position than its proponents claim. I conclude that we should be sceptical about how much expressivists gain by appealing to conceptual role semantics. (shrink)

This paper examines the integration and unification of the philosophy and psychology of well-being. For the most part, these disciplines investigate well-being without reference to each other. In recent years, however, with the maturing of each discipline, there have been a growing number of calls to integrate the two. While such calls are welcome, what it means to integrate well-being philosophy and psychology can vary greatly depending on one’s theoretical and practical ends. The aim of this paper is to provide (...) a novel conceptual framework for thinking about integrating well-being philosophy and psychology that systematically categorizes different kinds of integration projects. We divide existing attempts in the literature into three broad categories according to the perspective from which the integration takes place: (1) top-down meta-theoretical unification; (2) psychological integration within philosophy; and (3) philosophical integration within psychology. These categories are then broken down into various further subcategories. Our aim in providing this framework is both to facilitate the assessment and comparison of existing integration attempts and to provide a roadmap for future integration attempts. For each category, we discuss one or two representative examples of the approaches. By doing so, we hope to generate interest in the wide variety of existing integration projects, as well as to generate discussion concerning the benefits and pitfalls of different approaches. (shrink)

En este artículo deseamos observar, desde el punto de vista literario, el relato de la Creación contado por los indígenas mayas-quichés en el Popol Vuh y compararlo con el relato bíblico del Génesis. Encontrar los puntos en común y las diferencias entre los dos textos nos llevará a observar la idea ..

At a time when there is an ever-widening gap between what the expert knows and what the average person believes, this accessible volume clearly explains the scientific facts and concepts that are indispensable for an understanding of our material universe. Milton Rothman examines sixteen standard myths about the nature of science, demonstrating that much of what passes for logical argumentation consists of the repetition of clichés and current folklore.--Publisher description.

End-of-life decision making is fraught with ethical challenges. Withholding or withdrawing life support therapy is widely considered ethical in patients with high treatment burden, poor premorbid status, or significant projected disability even when such treatment is not “futile.” Whether such withdrawal of therapy in the aftermath of attempted suicide is ethical is not well established in the literature. We provide a clinical vignette and propose criteria under which such withdrawal would be ethical. We suggest that it is appropriate to withdraw (...) life support, regardless of the cause of the critical illness or disability, when the following criteria are met: (1) Surrogates request withdrawal of care and the adequacy of surrogates is confirmed, (2) an external reasonability standard is met, (3) passage of time, perhaps 72 hours, to allow certainty regarding the patient's wishes, and (4) psychiatric morbidity should be considered as grounds for withdrawal only in truly treatment-refractory cases. Fundamentally, we believe the question to ask is, “If this were not an attempted suicide, would a request to withdraw care be reasonable?” We believe that under these circumstances, such withdrawal of life support, even in an individual who has attempted suicide, does not constitute physician assistance with suicide and is distinct from physician aid-in-dying in several important respects. (shrink)

End-of-life decision making is fraught with ethical challenges. Withholding or withdrawing life support therapy is widely considered ethical in patients with high treatment burden, poor premorbid status, or significant projected disability even when such treatment is not ?futile.? Whether such withdrawal of therapy in the aftermath of attempted suicide is ethical is not well established in the literature. We provide a clinical vignette and propose criteria under which such withdrawal would be ethical. We suggest that it is appropriate to withdraw (...) life support, regardless of the cause of the critical illness or disability, when the following criteria are met: (1) Surrogates request withdrawal of care and the adequacy of surrogates is confirmed, (2) an external reasonability standard is met, (3) passage of time, perhaps 72 hours, to allow certainty regarding the patient's wishes, and (4) psychiatric morbidity should be considered as grounds for withdrawal only in truly treatment-refractory cases. Fundamentally, we believe the question to ask is, ?If this were not an attempted suicide, would a request to withdraw care be reasonable?? We believe that under these circumstances, such withdrawal of life support, even in an individual who has attempted suicide, does not constitute physician assistance with suicide and is distinct from physician aid-in-dying in several important respects. (shrink)

Background and aims: Recent investigations have highlighted the value of neuropsychological testing for the assessment and screening of Alcohol-Related Brain Damage. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the suitability of the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination and the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status for this purpose. Methods: Comparing 28 participants with ARBD and 30 alcohol-dependent participants without ARBD we calculated Area Under the Curve statistics, sensitivity and specificity values, base-rate adjusted predictive values, and likelihood ratios for (...) both tests. Results: High levels of screening accuracy were found for the total scores of both the ACE-III and RBANS at multiple cut-off points. Removing participants with a history of polysubstance from the samples improved the diagnostic capabilities of the RBANS substantially, while only minor improvements to the ACE-III’s accuracy were observed. Conclusions: Overall, both the ACE-III and RBANS are suitable tools for ARBD screening within an alcohol-dependent population, though the RBANS is the superior of the two. Clinicians using these tools for ARBD screening should be cautious of false-positive outcomes and should therefore combine them with other assessment methods and more detailed neuropsychological testing before reaching diagnostic decisions. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to outline a Kantian form of cosmopolitan law and the jurisprudence involved in the creation of a cosmopolitan constitution. This article explores and discusses Kantian cosmopolitan law, the idea of cosmopolitan right, the laws of hospitality and a Kantian approach to constitutional cosmopolitanism. In doing so, the article argues beyond Kant's discussion of constitutionalism, suggesting that a written constitution not only articulates many of Kant's cosmopolitan concerns, but also provides a reasonable ethical foundation for (...) an international society. Throughout this discussion, more particular aspects of Kant's legal conception of cosmopolitanism are examined, focusing on the possibility of an ethical cosmopolitan order based on jurisprudence, the necessity of a minimal consensus bound by constitutional provisions, and the corresponding legal obligations maintained by cosmopolitan law. (shrink)

This volume aims to capture the basic thrust of progressive views about justice in the recent period. Fisk's selections show that in the ground-breaking work now being done, there is a unity of ethical and political considerations. Theoretical concerns and studies of practical justice are also addressed. The editor incorporates high theory as expounded by figures like Rawls and Habermas, as well as applications to issues of race, gender, law, ecology and class. Since the 19th century intellectual background is important (...) for studying current developments in justice, J S Mill, Marx and T H Green are also included to represent the current of social change from that time. Finally, recent debates on whether justice can be colour- or gender-blind are represented in the writings of a number of known African-American and women writers. The anthology focuses on applied issues. It should be of interest to students taking courses in political philosophy, political theory, ethics, social theory and intellectual history. It should also be a useful guide for graduate students and instructors who wish to follow the current debate on justice. (shrink)