This article examines factors related to husbands' contribution to housework when their wives become newly impaired. Data are from a sample of 319 married couples who participated in the National Survey of Families and Households, and in which wives developed physical limitations between baseline and five-year follow-up interviews. Using ordinary least squares regression, we found that husbands who have egalitarian attitudes toward marital roles and are happy in their marriage at baseline do more housework at follow-up than husbands who are (...) traditional and/or are less happy. Given the slow rate of change in household division of labor, the lack of public policies to support people with impairment and family caregiving disproportionately burdens women. (shrink)

Although theoretically rigorous, the book is comprehensible to the beginning qualitative researcher.

Individuals with a variety of disabilities benefit greatly from the ADA provision of easy public access with their service dogs. However, the growing problem of non-disabled individuals passing off their pets as service dogs both threatens public safety and can result in denial of access for legitimate service dog teams. We argue that requiring certification of service dog teams and furnishing qualified teams with state-issued ID tags, following a process similar to that for obtaining accessible-parking placards, is the least intrusive (...) way to protect access for legitimate teams and protect public safety. While some consider a certification requirement for service dog teams to be burdensome, balanced against the harms posed by easy public access for untrained or inappropriate dogs, the mild burden is justified. (shrink)

The avocado (Persea americana) is a major crop commodity worldwide. Moreover, avocado, a paleopolyploid, is an evolutionary “outpost” among flowering plants, representing a basal lineage (the magnoliid clade) near the origin of the flowering plants themselves. Following centuries of selective breeding, avocado germplasm has been characterized at the level of microsatellite and RFLP markers. Nonetheless, little is known beyond these general diversity estimates, and much work remains to be done to develop avocado as a major subtropical‐zone crop. Among the goals (...) of avocado improvement are to develop varieties with fruit that will “store” better on the tree, show uniform ripening and have better post‐harvest storage. Avocado transcriptome sequencing, genome mapping and partial genomic sequencing will represent a major step toward the goal of sequencing the entire avocado genome, which is expected to aid in improving avocado varieties and production, as well as understanding the evolution of flowers from non‐flowering seed plants (gymnosperms). Additionally, continued evolutionary and other comparative studies of flower and fruit development in different avocado strains can be accomplished at the gene expression level, including in comparison with avocado relatives, and these should provide important insights into the genetic regulation of fruit development in basal angiosperms. BioEssays 30:386–396, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Background Nurses experienced intense ethical and moral challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our 2020 qualitative parent study of frontline nurses’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic identified ethics as a cross-cutting theme with six subthemes: moral dilemmas, moral uncertainty, moral distress, moral injury, moral outrage, and moral courage. We re-analyzed ethics-related findings in light of refined definitions of ethics concepts. Research aim To analyze frontline U.S. nurses’ experiences of ethics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research design Qualitative analysis using a directed content (...) methodology. Participants and research context The study included 43 nurses from three major metropolitan academic medical centers and one community hospital in the northeastern, mid-Atlantic, midwestern, and western United States. Ethical considerations Participant privacy and data confidentiality were addressed. Findings Moral dilemmas arose from many situations, most frequently related to balancing safety and patient care. Moral uncertainty commonly arose from lacking health information or evidence about options. Moral distress occurred when nurses knew the right thing to do, but were prevented from doing so, including with end-of-life issues. Moral injury (accompanied by suffering, shame, or guilt) occurred after doing, seeing, or experiencing wrongdoing, often involving authority figures. Nurses expressed moral outrage at events and people within and outside healthcare. Despite difficult ethical situations, some nurses exemplified moral courage, sometimes by resisting policies they perceived as preventing compassionate care, guided by thinking about what was best for patients. Discussion This content analysis of ethics-related subthemes revealed conceptual characteristics and clarified distinctions with corresponding exemplars. Conceptual clarity may inform responses and interventions to address ethical quandaries in nursing practice. Conclusions Ethics education in nursing must address the moral dilemmas of pandemics, disasters, and other crises. Nurses need time and resources to heal from trying to provide the best care when no ideal option was available. (shrink)

The Proceedings of the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control is based on a two-part conceptual framework composed of public health and legal perspectives. The public health perspective comprises the six target areas and intervention settings that are the focus of the obesity prevention and control efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.This paper presents the legal perspective. Legal preparedness in public health is the underpinning of the framework for the four “assessment” papers and (...) the four “action” papers that are integral to the application of public health law to any particular health issue. In addition, this paper gives real-world grounding to the legal framework through examples that illustrate the four core elements of legal preparedness in public health that are at work in obesity prevention and control. (shrink)

The Proceedings of the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control is based on a two-part conceptual framework composed of public health and legal perspectives. The public health perspective comprises the six target areas and intervention settings that are the focus of the obesity prevention and control efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.This paper presents the legal perspective. Legal preparedness in public health is the underpinning of the framework for the four “assessment” papers and (...) the four “action” papers that are integral to the application of public health law to any particular health issue. In addition, this paper gives real-world grounding to the legal framework through examples that illustrate the four core elements of legal preparedness in public health that are at work in obesity prevention and control. (shrink)

The Drosophila salivary gland has emerged as an outstanding model system for the process of organ formation. Many of the component steps, from initial regional specification through cell specialization and morphogenesis, are known and many of the genes required for these different processes have been identified. The salivary gland is a relatively simple organ; the entire gland comprises of only two major cell types, which derive from a single contiguous primordium. Salivary cells cease dividing once they are specified, and organ (...) growth is achieved simply by an increase in size of individual cells, thus eliminating concerns about the potential unequal distribution of determinants during mitosis. Drosophila salivary glands form by the same cellular mechanisms as organs in higher organisms, including regulated cell shape changes, cell intercalation and directed cell migration. Thus, learning how these events are coordinated for tissue morphogenesis in an organism for which the genetic and molecular tools are unsurpassed should provide excellent paradigms for dissecting related processes in the more intricate organs of more complicated species. BioEssays 23:901–911, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Ideas of love within religion are usually driven by one of two mythologies – either a personal God who commands love or a mystical God of ineffable love – but both are inadequate for motivating love of neighbour. The first tends towards legalism and the second offers no cognitive guidance. The situation is further complicated by there being different understandings of love of neighbour in the various Abrahamic religions, as exemplified in the approaches of two philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel (...) Levinas. A better approach is therefore to explore actual practices of love in everyday life, and to discover how love might be performed openly and creatively. One such practice is recognition of vulnerability, and this too is often driven by a mythology, in this case one marked by fear, and by a violence either imposed or avoided. One paradigmatic example is the vulnerability felt by speakers, especially women, in front of an audience. A turning from wilful ignorance of vulnerability and a turning to reliance on collective work, modelled on an awareness of mutual vulnerability and openness to the unknown, will help to change our philosophical and social imaginary. The dark myth of vulnerability can be transformed into finding opportunities in vulnerability for openness to affection and so to an enhancement of life. It is only from the perspective of this new imaginary, and from everyday practices of it, that the double love-command – love of God and love of neighbour – will function as any kind of common ground between religions. (shrink)

Concerns regarding corporate ethics have grown steadily throughout the past decade. In order to remain competitive, many organizational leaders are faced with the challenge of creating an ethical environment within their organization. A model is presented showing the process and elements necessary for the institutionalization of organizational ethics. The transformational leadership style lends itself well to the creation of an ethical environment and is suggested as a means to facilitate the institutionalization of corporate ethics. Finally, the benefits of using transformational (...) leadership are demonstrated through the components of a psychological contract, organizational commitment, and ethical culture to institutionalize organizational ethics. (shrink)

Nurses have a long tradition of storytelling. Nurses in the New Zealand government’s Backblocks Nursing Service, established in 1909 for settlers in remote rural areas, related narratives of personal experience in articles, conference papers and letters to their chief nurse that were published in the country’s nursing journal. Analysis of the 16 stories published between 1910 and 1915 revealed 14 had a common storyline and structure. Structural elements included a call, arduous journey, arrival and reconnaissance, trial (difficult case or circumstance), (...) resolution and homily. Using a literary folkloristics approach, this article argues that repetition of the story by nurses in different regions traditionalised it as a professional folktale, ‘The nurse’s odyssey’. It enabled nurses to debrief from difficult cases and write‐into‐being this new role and practice. Striking differences in the practice setting ensured the story’s reportability, while clinical details connected writer and readers through a common professional aesthetic context and strengthened the story’s credibility. For the chief nurse who was also a journal editor, publishing the stories allowed her to potentially attract nurses to the service while alerting them to its harsh realities, and show policy‐makers the profession’s value in meeting new health service needs. (shrink)

Physicians and other health care providers owe ethical and legal duties to patients to maintain the secrecy of the information learned during the course of patient care. This obligation is fulfilled by limiting access to such information to only those involved in the patient's care-that is, to those within the “circle of confidentiality.” As a general rule, providers may only disclose to others with the written prior consent of the patient. Exceptions may be “ethically and legally justified because of overriding (...) social considerations,” when permitted or compelled by law. For example, eleven states permit providers to disclose identified records to approved researchers.’ Many states compel disclosure in cases where a patient threatens serious bodily harm to another; require reporting to health or law enforcement authorities of communicable diseases, gunshot or knife wounds, or child abuse; and mandate reporting of cancer or other health care cases to state registries. (shrink)

Physicians and other health care providers owe ethical and legal duties to patients to maintain the secrecy of the information learned during the course of patient care. This obligation is fulfilled by limiting access to such information to only those involved in the patient's care-that is, to those within the “circle of confidentiality.” As a general rule, providers may only disclose to others with the written prior consent of the patient. Exceptions may be “ethically and legally justified because of overriding (...) social considerations,” when permitted or compelled by law. For example, eleven states permit providers to disclose identified records to approved researchers.’ Many states compel disclosure in cases where a patient threatens serious bodily harm to another; require reporting to health or law enforcement authorities of communicable diseases, gunshot or knife wounds, or child abuse; and mandate reporting of cancer or other health care cases to state registries. (shrink)

Many assume that we can be responsible only what is voluntary. This leads to puzzlement about our responsibility for our beliefs, since beliefs seem not to be voluntary. I argue against the initial assumption, presenting an account of responsibility and of voluntariness according to which, not only is voluntariness not required for responsibility, but the feature which renders an attitude a fundamental object of responsibility (that the attitude embodies one’s take on the world and one’s place in it) also guarantees (...) that it could not be voluntary. It turns out, then, that, for failing to be voluntary, beliefs are a central example of the sort of thing for which we are most fundamentally responsible. (shrink)

The paper presents evidence in bacteria for the utility of Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis, using certain kinds of signal transduction systems as proxies for cognitive/behavioral complexity. Microbiologists already accept that the number of signal transduction proteins in a bacterial genome indicates the level of ecological complexity to which the organism is subject: the more signalling proteins, the greater the complexity. Sheer numbers are not always a reliable indicator of behavioral complexity, however. The paper proposes a new, ECT-based procedure for identifying, (...) from genomic sequence and signalling repertoire, novel bacterial candidates likely to exhibit behavioral complexity in response to a complex ecological niche. (shrink)

Patient report of functioning is one component of the neurocognitive exam following traumatic brain injury, and standardized patient-reported outcomes measures are useful to track outcomes during rehabilitation. The Traumatic Brain Injury Quality of Life measurement system is a TBI-specific extension of the PROMIS and Neuro-QoL measurement systems that includes 20 item banks across physical, emotional, social, and cognitive domains. Previous research has evaluated the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL measures in community-dwelling individuals and found clinically important change over a 6-month assessment (...) interval in a sample of individuals who were on average 5 years post-injury. In the present study, we report on the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL Cognition–General Concerns and Executive Function item bank scores and the Cognitive Health Composite scores in a recently injured sample over a 1-year study period. Data from 128 participants with complicated mild, moderate, or severe TBI within the previous 6 months were evaluated. The majority of the sample was male, white, and non-Hispanic. The participants were 18–92 years of age and were first evaluated from 0 to 5 months post-injury. Eighty participants completed the 1-year follow-up assessment. Results show acceptable standard response mean values for all measures and minimal detectable change values ranging from 8.2 to 8.8 T-score points for Cognition–General Concerns and Executive Functioning measures. Anchor rating analysis revealed that changes in scores on the Executive Function item bank and the Cognitive Health Composite were meaningfully associated with participant-reported changes in the areas of attention, multitasking, and memory. Evaluation of change score differences by a variety of clinical indicators demonstrated a small but significant difference in the three TBI-QOL change scores by TBI injury severity grouping. These results support the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL cognition measures in newly injured individuals and provides information on the minimal important differences for the TBI-QOL cognition measures, which can be used for score interpretation by clinicians and researchers seeking patient-reported outcome measures of self-reported cognitive QOL after TBI. (shrink)

Donald Davidson opens ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ by asking, ‘What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did?’ His answer has generated some confusion about reasons for action and made for some difficulty in understanding the place for the agent's own reasons for acting, in the explanation of an action. I offer here a different account of the explanation of action, one that, though (...) minimal and formal, preserves the proper role for the agent's own reasons for acting. (shrink)

Confusion remains about the concept “nursing science.” Definitions vary, depending on country, context and setting. Even among nurse scholars and scientists there is disagreement about the content and boundaries of nursing science. There is an urgent need for an acceptable definition that can guide nursing knowledge development, education, and practice. In this article, we highlight the problems for the profession of this sort of conceptual ambiguity, arguing that it is an ethical responsibility for the profession to gain clarity about the (...) meaning and apt focus of our knowledge development initiatives. We parse out nursing and science as separate concepts and synthesize from this analysis a simple yet comprehensive definition of nursing science. We propose that this definition is capable of unifying ongoing nursing endeavors and should serve as the basis for evaluating nursing's knowledge development and educational initiatives. (shrink)

I will argue that making a certain assumption allows us to conceptualize more clearly our agency over our minds. The assumption is this: certain attitudes (most uncontroversially, belief and intention) embody their subject’s answer to some question or set of questions. I will first explain the assumption and then show that, given the assumption, we should expect to exercise agency over this class of attitudes in (at least) two distinct ways: by answering for ourselves the question they embody and by (...) acting upon them in ways designed to affect them according to our purposes—in roughly the way we exercise agency over most ordinary objects. (shrink)

Michèle Le Doeuff's "Primal Scene": Prohibition and Confidence in the Education of a Woman My essay begins with Michèle Le Doeuff's singular account of the "primal scene" in her own education as a woman, illustrating a universally significant point about the way in which education can differ for men and women: gender difference both shapes and is shaped by the imaginary of a culture as manifest in how texts matter for Le Doeuff. Her primal scene is the first moment she (...) remembers when, while aspiring to think for herself, a prohibition is placed in her reading of literature. Her philosophyteacher—at a boys' school—told the young Michèle that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was "too difficult" for her to read. In recalling this scene, the older Michèle—now, a woman philosopher—directs her readers to this text by Kant, in order to demonstrate how knowledge has been constrained by the narrative and imagery in the text of a philosopher; similarly, in the texts of others. She finds the central imagery of Kant's text for setting the limits to human knowledge in his account of "the island of understanding," or "land of truth," surrounded by "a stormy sea" of uncertainty; the latter image also retains a seductive appeal, threatening to destroy the confidence of any knower who ventures out beyond the well-marked out island. Moreover, women have often been associated with the dangers at sea beyond the safety of the island, where falsehood and worse reign. I propose that "text matters" here not only for gender issues, but for the postcolonial theory which Le Doeuff's reading of island imagery enhances in western literature and culture. The suggestion is that women in the history of ideas have been more susceptible than men to prohibitions : women's negative education is against going beyond certain boundaries which have been fixed by a generally colonialist culture on the grounds of gender-hierarchies. I stress the significance of confidence in the production of knowledge. A lack or an inhibition of confidence in one's own ability to think critically risks the damaging exclusions of, for example, colonialism and sexism. My aim is to unearth the political biases evident in textual imagery, while also pointing to new epistemic locations, with island-and-sea imagery that transgresses patriarchal prohibition, liberating subjects for confident reading and writing of texts today. (shrink)

This volume contains an array of essays that reflect, and reflect upon, the recent revival of scholarly interest in the self and consciousness. Various relevant issues are addressed in conceptually challenging ways, such as how consciousness and different forms of self-relevant experience develop in infancy and childhood and are related to the acquisition of skill; the role of the self in social development; the phenomenology of being conscious and its metapsychological implications; and the cultural foundations of conceptualizations of consciousness. Written (...) by notable scholars in several areas of psychology, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and anthropology, the essays are of interest to readers from a variety of disciplines concerned with central, substantive questions in contemporary social science, and the humanities. (shrink)

Nearly sixty years after its publication, P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” continues to inspire important work. Its main legacy has been the notion of “reactive attitudes.” Surprisingly, Strawson’s central argument—an argument to the conclusion that no general thesis (such as the thesis of determinism) could provide us reason to abandon these attitudes—has received little attention. When the argument is considered, it is often interpreted as relying on a claim about our psychological capacities: we are simply not capable of abandoning (...) the reactive attitudes, across the board, in something like the way we are simply not capable of remembering everything we are told. A different line interprets Strawson as relying on something like a conceptual point: you can neither support nor call into question the whole of a practice using notions that are, themselves, constituted by that practice. Neither interpretation would lead to you to expect what you will find, looking at the central text: Strawson twice accuses his opponent of being caught in some kind of contradiction. So neither interpretation, on its own, is correct. By providing a close reading of the central text, I do my best to articulate Strawson’s more interesting, and more powerful, argument. The argument depends on an underlying picture of the nature of moral demands and moral relationships—a picture that has gone largely unnoticed, that is naturalistic without being reductionistic, and that is, I think, worthy of serious consideration. (shrink)

According to ‘Excluders’, descriptive uncertainty – but not normative uncertainty – matters to what we ought to do. Recently, several authors have argued that those wishing to treat normative uncertainty differently from descriptive uncertainty face a dependence problem because one's descriptive uncertainty can depend on one's normative uncertainty. The aim of this paper is to determine whether the phenomenon of dependence poses a decisive problem for Excluders. I argue that existing arguments fail to show this, and that, while stronger ones (...) can be found, Excluders can escape them. (shrink)

This article reflects on the conceptual and aesthetic practices engaged in the development of a performance work by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum titled DISRUPTERS, THIS IS DISRUPTER X. Nkosi/Sunstrum liberally describe this multimedia performance work as an ‘anti-opera’. In 2014, the Iwalewahaus African Art Archive at the University of Bayreuth invited Nkosi and Sunstrum to make further developments to an anti-opera they had been conceiving since 2013. The invitation formed part of ‘Mashup The Archive’, an artist (...) residency encouraging contemporary artists from Africa to engage with the Iwalewahaus Archive. The resulting performance was presented at the Schokofabrik, Bayreuth and was a tour through a ‘maquette’ of the anti-opera. It was a ‘living maquette’ in which audiences (termed ‘Safarists’) travelled through stations illustrating sketches of scenes, histories of characters, and other fragments of narrative exposition. The artists illustrated these stations using both ‘relics’ from the Iwalewahaus Archive, and newly generated digital and analogue content. Using a common tactic found in electronic music known as ‘sampling’, Nkosi/Sunstrum recontextualized and reinvented these artefacts to form part of the anti-opera narrative. The world of the anti-opera was created by video projections, sound streamed live to Bayreuth from Johannesburg, handmade replicas of archival objects, original music created from archival instruments, live performers and a professional opera singer. South African literary theorists Delphi Carstens and Mer Roberts suggest that the sci-fi genre ‘offers a potential vehicle for expressing the African oral mythical mode and a (re)writing of the continent’s marginalized oral histories in the mythopoeic mode’.1 Nkosi/Sunstrum are interested in the radical implications of this view and are using sci-fi as a tactic for imagining and ‘occupying’ new African futures. (shrink)

Here I defend my solution to the wrong-kind-of-reason problem against Mark Schroeder’s criticisms. In doing so, I highlight an important difference between other accounts of reasons and my own. While others understand reasons as considerations that count in favor of attitudes, I understand reasons as considerations that bear (or are taken to bear) on questions. Thus, to relate reasons to attitudes, on my account, we must consider the relation between attitudes and questions. By considering that relation, we not only solve (...) the wrong-kind-of-reason problem, but we also bring into view rational agency—the use of reasons in thought. (shrink)

Author of "Kubla Khan" and the epic "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Taylor Coleridge is remembered principally for his contributions as a romantic poet. This innovative reconsideration of Coleridge's thought and career not only demonstrates his importance as a philosopher but also recovers romanticism as both an aesthetic and a political movement. Pamela Edwards radically departs from classic theories of Coleridge's development and reads his writing within the framework of a constantly shifting political and social landscape. Drawing (...) on the ideology, rhetoric, and institutional theory at the turn of the late British Enlightenment, Edwards unearths the fundamental continuities in Coleridge's writing during the revolutionary period of 1794 to 1834, paying particular attention to the rhetoric of Coleridge's pamphlet and miscellaneous writings, the journalism of the Napoleonic years, his philosophical and ultimately political treatises within the contexts of his notebooks and letters, and his readings and intellectual friendships. What emerges is a clearer understanding of Coleridge's political philosophy and his contributions to the origins and ideology of British Liberalism. Coleridge's interest in history, nature, and law as inherently interconnected projects producing an ideal or scientific reading of society reveals a developed progressive social and cultural state theory anchored in individual conscience, moral autonomy, and a civic and participatory human agency. If the Statesman could understand and finally master this scientific view of the world, he would be able not only to adjust political and social institutions to comprehend the historical contingencies of the moment but to see through the problem of the moment to the dynamic of change itself. (shrink)

I here defend an account of the will as practical reason —or, using Kant's phrase, as " reason in its practical employment"—as against a view of the will as a capacity for choice, in addition to reason, by which we execute practical judgments in action. Certain commonplaces show distance between judgment and action and thus seem to reveal the need for a capacity, in addition to reason, by which we execute judgment in action. However, another ordinary fact pushes in the (...) other direction: the activities of the will are activities for which the person is answerable in a very particular sort of way. This answerability is most easily understood if willing involves settling a question. Settling a question seems to be a capacity of reason. Thus it can seem that activities of will are activities of our capacity for reasoning. I will suggest that we can accommodate the commonplaces while still understanding the will as reason in its practical employment, by abandoning the assumption that practical reasoning concludes in a judgment. Rather, reasoning which concludes in a judgment—reasoning directed at the question of whether p—is theoretical reasoning. In its practical employment, reason is directed at the question of whether to x; it concludes, not in a judgment about x-ing, but rather in an intention to x. (shrink)

In this rich cultural history, Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines America's ambivalent and shifting attitude toward homelessness through a close study of film cycles from five distinct historical moments that show characters as unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed: failing, resisting, or opting out of the mandate for a home of one's own. From the tramp films of the Silent Era to the Oscar-winning Nomadland in 2021, Wojcik shows how film cycles reveal a tension in the American imaginary between (...) viewing homelessness as, on the one hand, deviant or threatening, and, on the other, emblematic of freedom and independence. Blending social history with insights drawn from a complex array of films, both canonical and fringe, Wojcik effectively 'unhomes' dominant narratives that cast aspirations for success and social mobility as the focus of American cinema, reminding us that genres of precarity have been central to the American cinema (and American story) all along. (shrink)

Through a content analysis of print media and a comparison of media images with trends in women's behavior, the authors explore the rhetoric and reality surrounding the exit of college-educated women from the workforce to become full-time mothers, a phenomenon that has been dubbed “opting out.” The major imagery surrounding opting out emphasizes motherhood and family, elites, and choice. A close reading reveals some inconsistencies that counter the prevailing positive depiction. The authors also find that media coverage of opting out (...) appears in leading publications reaching large and diverse audiences. A comparison of articles' themes against actual trends in women's opting-out behavior shows that there is a disjuncture between the two. The authors discuss the implications of these results for the dissemination of a new feminine mystique. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The reconstruction of Paul Ricoeur's philosophical project presented in this thesis endeavours to bring together his various ideas concerning human willing in order to assess the contribution they are able to make to contemporary Christian theology. This critical assessment identifies the field of concepts and issues that comprise Ricoeur's Kantian account of willing; it also challenges his reliance on a paradoxical account of the human subject as being both (...) temporal and non-temporal. ;Ricoeur's dual-aspect account of willing assumes that the human subject is not merely passive in receiving the intuitions of experience but is actively involved in the constitution of objective experience and in the self-recognition of human freedom as 'a captive free will'. Human freedom, then, can only be adequately understood in terms of the symbolism of 'captivity' and 'deliverance'. For Ricoeur it is the Judaeo-Christian 'myths' concerning the origin and the end of evil which uniquely symbolise the experience of deliverance from captivity by representing Jesus Christ as the decisive figure of hope for a transformation of human consciousness and circumstances. ;However, at the same time as offering this positive assessment it is argued that Ricoeur's dual-aspect account of human willing--privileging, as it does, the conceptual hypostases of 'the temporal' and 'the non-temporal'--is founded upon a transcendental idealist problematic. In order to go beyond adherence to an abstract and possibly mystifying view of 'the non-temporal' the ultimate emphasis in this thesis is placed upon the transformative and transignifying possibilities of the dual reconstructive process which both constitute and are constituted by Ricoeur's 'hermeneutics of suspicion' and 'hermeneutics of faith'. An authentic faith--and thus the paramount condition of an authentic theology itself--depends, in Ricoeurian terms, upon both a critical and restorative reconstruction and reconstitution of the human bond with the sacred. (shrink)

In this project I claim that Dewey's version of pragmatism leads to an approach to identifying and addressing conflicts between human and nonhuman interests which help bridge the gap between practice and theory in environmental ethics. I claim that traditional arguments in environmental ethics often give little or no guidance to resolving conflicts faced by those involved with environmental practice. After describing traditional arguments in environmental ethics, I argue that Dewey's philosophy offers an alternative to those arguments which gives direction (...) to practitioners for resolving conflicts so that all parties to a conflict "grow" as a result of the conflict. ;In my examination of Dewey's philosophy I focus on the notions of inquiry, experience, growth, the idea of character in moral judgment, and Dewey's concept of the "good". I show how the focus which comes from an examination of those concepts directs us to focus on particular difficulties faced by particular people as they move around in their lives and come in conflict with different views, their own and others, about what is the "right" course of action. I also show how a Deweyan approach to environmental ethics lends support to major claims of the ecofeminists. (shrink)