Background:Complex and expensive treatment options have increased the frequency and emphasis of ethical decision-making in healthcare. In order to meet these challenges effectively, we need to identify how nurses contribute the resolution of these dilemmas.Aims:To identify the values, beliefs and contextual influences that inform decision-making. To identify the contribution made by nurses in achieving the resolution of ethical dilemmas in practice.Design:An interpretive exploratory study was undertaken, 11 registered acute care nurses working in a district general hospital in England were interviewed, (...) using semi-structured interviews. In-depth content analysis of the data was undertaken via NVivo coding and thematic identification.Participants and context:Participants were interviewed about their contribution to the resolution of ethical dilemmas within the context of working in an acute hospital ward. Participants were recruited from all settings working with patients of any age and any diagnosis.Ethical considerations:Ethical approval was obtained from the local National Research Ethics Committee.Findings:Four major themes emerged: ‘best for the patient’, ‘accountability’, ‘collaboration and conflict’ and ‘concern for others’. Moral distress was also evident in the literature and findings, with moral dissonance recognised and articulated by more experienced nurses. The relatively small, single-site sample may not account for the effects of organisational culture on the results; the findings suggested that professional relationships were key to resolving ethical dilemmas.Discussion:Nurses use their moral reasoning based on their beliefs and values when faced with ethical dilemmas. Subsequent actions are mediated though ethical decision-making frames of reference including deontology, consequentialism, the ethics of care and virtue ethics. Nurses use these in contributing to the resolution of these dilemmas. Nurses require the skills to develop and maintain professional relationships for addressing ethical dilemmas and to engage with political and organisational macro- and micro-decision-making.Conclusion:Nurses’ professional relationships are central to nurses’ contributions to the resolution of ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

Fractal patterns offer one way to represent the rough complexity of the natural world. Whilst they dominate many of our visual experiences in nature, little large-scale perceptual research has been done to explore how we respond aesthetically to these patterns. Previous research (Taylor et al., 2011) suggests that the fractal patterns with mid-range fractal dimensions have universal aesthetic appeal. Perceptual and aesthetic responses to visual complexity have been more varied with findings suggesting both linear (Forsythe et al., 2011) and curvilinear (...) (Berlyne, 1970) relationships. Individual differences have been found to account for many of the differences we see in aesthetic responses but some, such as culture, have received little attention within the fractal and complexity research fields. This 2-study paper aims to test preference responses to fractal dimension and visual complexity, using a large cohort (N=443) of participants from around the world to allow universality claims to be tested. It explores the extent to which age, culture and gender can predict our preferences for fractally complex patterns. Following exploratory analysis that found strong correlations between fractal dimension and visual complexity, a series of linear mixed-effect models were implemented to explore if each of the individual variables could predict preference. The first tested a linear complexity model (likelihood of selecting the more complex image from the pair of images) and the second a mid-range fractal dimension model (likelihood of selecting an image within mid-range). Results show that individual differences can reliably predict preferences for complexity across culture, gender and age. However, in fitting with current findings the mid-range models show greater consistency in preference not mediated by gender, age or culture. This paper supports the established theory that the mid-range fractal patterns appear to be a universal construct underlying preference but also highlights the fragility of universal claims by demonstrating individual differences in preference for the interrelated concept of visual complexity. This highlights a current stalemate in the field of empirical aesthetics. (shrink)

Time and Fantasy in Narratives of Jihad: The Case of the Islami Jamiat-I-Tuleba in Karachi This article proposes an analytical framework for thinking about violence in the Islami Jamiat-i-Tuleba (IJT), the student organization of Jamaat e Islami (JI), Pakistan's longstanding Islamist party. It prioritises the intersection of the psychic and the social, and the role of politics, history and biography in mediating the modalities, narration and praxis of violence in the city of Karachi. The dominant explanations tend to emphasise political (...) instrumentalism, and structural and ideological factors, and to "Islamicise" the violence, collapsing Islamic rhetoric into an extemporization of conditions, ignoring the deep affective appeal of violence to individuals, and leaving unelaborated the role of intersecting national, local and individual contexts and temporalities in structuring political subjectivity and violent action. (shrink)

A general dearth of theoretical engagements with the embodied, historical, and especially the religious dimensions of disablement pervades the social sciences. Paradoxically, the religious heritage of the West is commonly identified as the implicit catalyst of many disabling attitudinal barriers impinging on impaired bodies. Addressing this inconsistency, this article extends dominant disability conceptualizations through combining embodiment theories and humanities perspectives. Ultimately the article seeks to demonstrate how interdisciplinary investigation can produce fresh insights into the relationships between attitudes towards physical impairment (...) and Christianized forms of Western sociality. First, the radicalization of the definition of disability in the field of disability studies is briefly discussed. Second, aspects of the sociology of the body are examined in order to illustrate how the concepts of ‘effervescent’ and ‘emergent’ embodiment, through highlighting the persistence of the sacred in ‘somatic society’, can assist in the formulation of an analytical framework, suitable for analysing the religio-cultural dimensions of impairment. Finally, the dynamism of Christian attitudes towards physical impairment is illustrated through a survey of historical and contemporaneous theological examples. The confluence of these fields, it is argued, enables the interconnected terrain between impairment, embodiment and the sacred to be mapped. (shrink)

Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan _Deconstructing Disney_ London: Pluto Press, 1999 ISBN 0 7453 1456 2 (hbk) 209 pp.

We suggest that variation, error, and bias will be essential to include in a complete computational theory of groups – particularly given that formation of group representations must often rely on inferences of intentions. We draw on the case study of paranoia to illustrate that intentions that do not correspond to group-constitutive roles may often be perceived as such.

Baumard et al. propose a functional explanation for the evolution of a sense of fairness in humans: Fairness preferences are advantageous in an environment where individuals are in strong competition to be chosen for social interactions. Such conditions also exist in nonhuman animals. Therefore, it remains unclear why fairness (equated with morality) appears to be properly present only in humans.

The widespread effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have negatively impacted upon many athletes’ mental health and increased reports of depression as well as symptoms of anxiety. Disruptions to training and competition schedules can induce athletes’ emotional distress, while concomitant government-imposed restrictions (e.g., social isolation, quarantines) reduce the availability of athletes’ social and emotional support. Written Emotional Disclosure (WED) has been used extensively in a variety of settings with diverse populations as a means to promote emotional processing. The (...) expressive writing protocol has been used to a limited extent in the context of sport and predominantly in support of athletes’ emotional processing during injury rehabilitation. We propose that WED offers an evidence-based treatment that can promote athletes’ mental health and support their return to competition. Research exploring the efficacy of the expressive writing protocol highlights a number of theoretical models underpinning the positive effects of WED; we outline how each of these potential mechanisms can address the multidimensional complexity of the challenging circumstances arising from the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., loss of earnings, returning to training and competition). Considerations and strategies for using WED to support athletes during the COVID-19 pandemic are presented. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to examine the justification for the mandatory drug testing of employees. The justification commonly assumes the form of the productivity argument which states that an employer has a proprietary right to regulate the purchased time of the employee. Since the employer may be rightfully concerned with the employee''s productive output, so this argument goes, the employer retains the right to motivate production. By extension, the employee''s behavior outside of the workplace which affects his or her (...) productive capacity may also be regulated, including drug use which may affect this capacity. Thus it is claimed that the employer has the right to test employees for drug use and to impose sanctions when it is discovered.I argue that the implications of the productivity argument lead to unacceptable consequences and thus must be rejected. The productivity argument can be examined in light of a thought-experiment in which the reader is asked to imagine the discovery of two drugs, both of which enhance employee productivity. Calling these drugs hedonine and pononine, I imagine the first to be pleasurable to the employee while the second is accompanied by a degree of pain and discomfort. Since the mandated use of both of these imagined drugs would be consistent with the productivity argument, I maintain that the productivity argument thereby fails and so must be rejected. As employee drug testing is justified by this argument, it must also be rejected. (shrink)

In any society influenced by a plurality of cultures, there will be widespread, systematic differences about at least some important values, including moral values. Many of these differences look like deep disagreements, difficult to resolve objectively if that is possible at all. One common response to the suspicion that these disagreements are unsettleable has always been moral relativism. In the flurry of sympathetic treatments of this doctrine in the last two decades, attention has understandably focused on the simpler case in (...) which one fairly self-contained and culturally homogeneous society confronts, at least in thought, the values of another; but most have taken relativism to have implications within a single pluralistic society as well. I am not among the sympathizers. That is partly because I am more optimistic than many about how many moral disagreements can be settled, but I shall say little about that here. For, even on the assumption that many disputes are unsettleable, I continue to find relativism a theoretically puzzling reaction to the problem of moral disagreement, and a troubling one in practice, especially when the practice involves regular interaction among those who disagree. This essay attempts to explain why. (shrink)

We need urgently to bring about a revolution in universities around the world, wherever possible, so that they take their fundamental task to be, not to acquire and apply knowledge, but rather to help humanity learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, so that we may make progress towards a good, genuinely civilized, wise world. The pursuit of knowledge would be a vital but subsidiary task. I have argued for the urgent need for (...) such an academic revolution for nearly 50 years, ever since the publication of two books: What’s Wrong With Science? Towards a People’s Rational Science of Delight and Compassion, 1976, and From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities, 1984, both available free online. This article, written in preparation for a talk given to Pittsburgh University on the 15th September 2023, gives an outline of my baffled struggles with problems of philosophy, science, literature and life that led up to the discovery of the urgent need for an intellectual and institutional revolution in universities around the world, needed in order to galvanize the social revolution required to enable us to make progress to a world in which peace, justice, democracy, individual freedom, sustainable prosperity, the possibility of a good life, are available to all, insofar as that is attainable. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 58-77.

We are in a state of impending crisis. And the fault lies in part with academia. For two centuries or so, academia has been devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how. This has enormously increased our power to act which has, in turn, brought us both all the great benefits of the modern world and the crises we now face. Modern science and technology have made possible modern industry and agriculture, the explosive growth of the world’s population, global (...) warming, modern armaments and the lethal character of modern warfare, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, immense inequalities of wealth and power across the globe, pollution of earth, sea and air, even the aids epidemic (aids being spread by modern travel). All these global problems have arisen because some of us have acquired unprecedented powers to act, via science and technology, without also acquiring the capacity to act wisely. (shrink)

In his celebrated article on the contrary-to-fact conditional Roderick Chisholm makes the following astute observation.

What is possible and why? What is the difference between the merely possible and the actual? In Kants Modal Metaphysics Nicholas Stang examines Kants lifelong engagement with these questions and their role in his philosophical development. This is the first book to trace Kants theory of possibility all theway from the so-called pre-Critical writings of the 1750s and 1760s to the Critical system of philosophy inaugurated by the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. Stang argues that the key to understanding (...) both the change and the continuity between Kants pre-Critical and Critical theory of possibility is his transformation of the ontological question about possibility-what is it for a being to be possible?-into a question in transcendental philosophy-what is it to represent an object as possible? (shrink)

Proposals to make us smarter than the greatest geniuses or to add thousands of years to our life spans seem fit only for the spam folder or trash can. And yet this is what contemporary advocates of radical enhancement offer in all seriousness. They present a variety of technologies and therapies that will expand our capacities far beyond what is currently possible for human beings. In _Humanity's End,_ Nicholas Agar argues against radical enhancement, describing its destructive consequences. Agar examines the (...) proposals of four prominent radical enhancers: Ray Kurzweil, who argues that technology will enable our escape from human biology; Aubrey de Grey, who calls for anti-aging therapies that will achieve "longevity escape velocity"; Nick Bostrom, who defends the morality and rationality of enhancement; and James Hughes, who envisions a harmonious democracy of the enhanced and the unenhanced. Agar argues that the outcomes of radical enhancement could be darker than the rosy futures described by these thinkers. The most dramatic means of enhancing our cognitive powers could in fact kill us; the radical extension of our life span could eliminate experiences of great value from our lives; and a situation in which some humans are radically enhanced and others are not could lead to tyranny of posthumans over humans. (shrink)

As environmental concerns rightly take a greater role in the critical reevaluation of the American philosophical tradition, it behooves us to return again to the often slippery notion of “nature” to ask if it can be redeemed as not merely the canvas on which human endeavor is depicted but an active element of the diverse and distinct philosophical perspectives that make the tradition. Indeed, there is a great need to depict the potentially subversive ways that human and nature can be (...) understood as radically connatural, in intimate ecological and constructive relations that make nature not just the instrument for the exertion for human wants and desires but also thoroughly and... (shrink)

Nicholas Jardine offers here an edition and the first translation into English of Johannes Kepler's A Defence of Tycho against Ursus. He accompanies this with essays on the provenance of the treatise - the circumstances which provoked Kepler to write it, an analysis of its strategy, style and historical sources and of the contents of Ursus' Treatise on Astronomical Hypotheses to which Kepler was replying. Dr Jardine also provides three extended interpretive essays on the intrinsic interest and historical significance of (...) the work. (shrink)

The Light of the Soul examines the debate between Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes on the nature of ideas, which was crucial to the development of early modern thinking about the mind and knowledge. Nicholas Jolley guides the reader through the debate and considers its implications for a broad range of issues, such as innate ideas, self-knowledge, scepticism, the mind-body problem, and the creation of the eternal truths, which are as important to philosophy today as they were in the seventeenth century.

Is it possible to prove or disprove God's existence? Arguments for the existence of God have taken many different forms over the centuries: in The Non-Existence of God, Nicholas Everitt considers all of the arguments and examines the role that reason and knowledge play in the debate over God's existence. He draws on recent scientific disputes over neo-Darwinism, the implication of 'big bang' cosmology, and the temporal and spatial size of the universe; and discusses some of the most recent work (...) on the subject, leading to a controversial conclusion. (shrink)

Commentators have shown a steady interest in the role of feeling in Kant’s moral and practical philosophy over the last few decades. Much attention has been given to the notion of ‘moral feeling’ in general, as well as to what Kant calls the ‘feeling of respect’ for the moral law. My focus in this essay is on the role of feeling in practical judgment. My claim in what follows is that the act of judging in the practical domain—i.e., determining what (...) one ought to do, or what action one ought to perform, in a specific case—crucially involves feeling. Put more simply: I argue that practical judgment has an essentially affective dimension. The upshot of the account I will give is that it provides us with a richer and more complex account of moral feeling than has previously been appreciated in the literature. While it is recognized that feeling plays a certain role in moral motivation, what I hope to demonstrate here is that feeling is involved much earlier in the exercise of moral agency. Far from entering only at the point at which we are trying to muster the strength of will to carry out what we know we ought to do, feeling is present the moment we begin to deliberate about what it is that we ought to do. (shrink)

The mind-body problem is widely seen as the great remaining challenge to science and philosophy. Why and how did matter evolve to take on the quality of mind? The author takes the reader to the edges of current knowledge and back to the beginning of time, before mind existed, and in doing so constructs a history of consciousness.

The two great philosophical figures at the culminating point of the Enlightenment are Thomas Reid in Scotland and Immanuel Kant in Germany. Reid was by far the most influential across Europe and the United States well into the nineteenth century. Since that time his fame and influence have been eclipsed by his German contemporary. This important book by one of today's leading philosophers of knowledge and religion will do much to reestablish the significance of Reid for philosophy today. Nicholas Wolterstorff (...) has produced the first systematic account of Reid's epistemology. Relating Reid's philosophy to present-day epistemological discussions the author demonstrates how they are at once remarkably timely, relevant, and provocative. No other book both uncovers the deep pattern of Reid's thought and relates it to contemporary philosophical debate. This book should be read by historians of philosophy as well as all philosophers concerned with epistemology and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In this provocative book, philosopher Nicholas Agar defends the idea that parents should be allowed to enhance their children’s characteristics. Gets away from fears of a Huxleyan ‘Brave New World’ or a return to the fascist eugenics of the past Written from a philosophically and scientifically informed point of view Considers real contemporary cases of parents choosing what kind of child to have Uses ‘moral images’ as a way to get readers with no background in philosophy to think about moral (...) dilemmas Provides an authoritative account of the science involved, making the book suitable for readers with no knowledge of genetics Creates a moral framework for assessing all new technologies. (shrink)

Are bacteriophage T4 and the long-nosed elephant fish valuable in their own right? Nicholas Agar defends an affirmative answer to this question by arguing that anything living is intrinsically valuable. This claim challenges received ethical wisdom according to which only human beings are valuable in themselves. The resulting biocentric or life-centered morality forms the platform for an ethic of the environment. -/- Agar builds a bridge between the biological sciences and what he calls "folk" morality to arrive at a workable (...) environmental ethic and a new spectrum--a new hierarchy--of living organisms. The book overturns common-sense moral belief as well as centuries of philosophical speculation on the exclusive moral significance of humans. Spanning several fields, including philosophy of psychology, philosophy of science, and other areas of contemporary analytic philosophy, Agar analyzes and speaks to a wide array of historic and contemporary views, from Aristotle and Kant, to E. O. Wilson, Holmes Rolston II, and Baird Callicot. The result is a challenge to prevailing definitions of value and a call for a scientifically-informed appreciation of nature. (shrink)

It is a rare privilege to have such eminent and insightful reviewers. Their kind words about the book are much appreciated – perhaps more than they realise. And I'm grateful to all three for having read the book so constructively. Each has given me several things to think about. In the space available here I will focus on the objections that seem most critical. Robert Rupert argues that I rely on an overly narrow understanding of what the cognitive sciences explain (...) (x1). Elisabeth Camp presses me on what precisely it takes to qualify as a structural representation and raises questions about holism (x2). John Krakauer makes a fundamental objection to positing representations when they seem not to be needed to explain behaviour (x3). (shrink)

This article develops and defends a triadic account of structural domination, according to which structural domination (e.g. patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism) is a triadic relation between dominator(s), dominated, and regulator(s)—the constitutive domination dyad plus those roles and norms expressively upholding it. The article elaborates on the relationship between structure and agency from the perspective of both oppressor and oppressed and discusses the deduction of the concept of the capitalist state from the concept of capitalism. On the basis of these definitions, (...) it shows that structural domination under capitalism presupposes collective power but no joint agency or shared intentions on the part of the dominators. (shrink)

What is the meaning of life? Does anything really matter? In the past few decades these questions, perennially associated with philosophy in the popular consciousness, have rightly retaken their place as central topics in the academy. In this major contribution, Nicholas Waghorn provides a sustained and rigorous elucidation of what it would take for lives to have significance. Bracketing issues about ways our lives could have more or less meaning, the focus is rather on the idea of ultimate meaning, the (...) issue of whether a life can attain meaning that cannot be called into question. Waghorn sheds light on this most fundamental of existential problems through a detailed yet comprehensive examination of the notion of nothing, embracing classic and cutting-edge literature from both the analytic and Continental traditions. Central figures such as Heidegger, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Nozick and Nagel are drawn upon to anchor the discussion in some of the most influential discussion of recent philosophical history. In the process of relating our ideas concerning nothing to the problem of life's meaning, Waghorn's book touches upon a number of fundamental themes, including reflexivity and its relation to our conceptual limits, whether religion has any role to play in the question of life's meaning, and the nature and constraints of philosophical methodology. A number of major philosophical traditions are addressed, including phenomenology, poststructuralism, and classical and paraconsistent logics. In addition to providing the most thorough current discussion of ultimate meaning, it will serve to introduce readers to philosophical debates concerning the notion of nothing, and the appendix engaging religion will be of value to both philosophers and theologians. (shrink)

Plausibly, an inference is an act of coming to believe something on the basis of something else you already believe. But what is it to come to believe some- thing on the basis of something else? I propose a disjunctive answer: it is either for some beliefs to rationally cause another—where rational causation is understood as causation that is either actually or potentially productive of knowledge—or for some beliefs to “deviantly” cause another, but for the believer mistakenly to come thereby (...) to believe that the former have rationally caused the latter. The result, I argue, is both a theoretically satisfying account of the act of inferring and a demonstration of the power of a knowledge-first approach to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to build towards an explanation of just what the matter is.

Human beings engage works of the arts in many different ways: they sing songs while working, they kiss icons, they create and dedicate memorials. Yet almost all philosophers of art of the modern period have ignored this variety and focused entirely on just one mode of engagement, namely, disinterested attention. Nicholas Wolterstorff asks why this might be, and proposes that almost all philosophers have accepted the grand narrative concerning art in the modern world. It is generally agreed that in the (...) early modern period, members of the middle class in Western Europe increasingly engaged works of the arts as objects of disinterested attention. The grand narrative claims that this change represented the arts coming into their own, and that works of art, so engaged, are socially other and transcendent. Wolterstorff rejects this claim, and offers an alternative framework for thinking about the arts. Central to his alternative framework are the idea of the arts as social practices and the idea of works of the arts as having different meaning in different practices. (shrink)