Nurses have moral obligations incurred by membership in the profession to participate knowingly in health policy advocacy. Many barriers have historically hindered nurses from realizing their potential to advance health policy. The contemporary political context sets additional challenges to policy work due to polarization and conflict. Nursing education can help nurses recognize their role in advancing health through political advocacy in a manner that is consistent with disciplinary knowledge and ethical responsibilities. In this paper, the authors describe an exemplar of (...) Elizabeth Barrett's “Power as Knowing Participation in Change” theory as a disciplinary lens within a doctoral nursing health policy course. Barrett (radically) emphasizes “power as freedom” instead of “power as control.” This approach is congruent with nursing disciplinary values and enhances awareness of personal freedom and building collaborative relationships in the policy process. The theory was used in concert with other traditional policy content and frameworks from nursing and other disciplines. We discuss the role of nursing ethics viewed as professional responsibility for policy action, an overview of Barrett's theory, and the design of the course. Four student reflections on how the course influenced their thinking about policy advocacy are included. While not specific to policymaking, Barrett's theory provides a disciplinary grounding to increase students' awareness of freedom and choices in political advocacy participation. Our experience suggests that Barrett's work can be fruitful for enhancing nurses' awareness of choices to participate in change across settings. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that, in order for white racial consciousness and practice to shift toward an antiracist praxis, a relational understanding of racism, the "self, "and society is necessary We find that such understanding arises from a confluence of propositional, affective, and tacit forms of knowledge about racism and one's own situatedness within it. We consider the claims sociologists have made about transformations in racial consciousness, bringing sociological theories of racism into dialogue with research on whiteness and antiracism. (...) We assert that sociological research on white racism and "whiteness" tends to privilege propositional and tacit/common sense knowledge, respectively, as critical to shifting white racial consciousness. Research on antiracism privileges affective knowledge as the source of antiracist change. We examine some of Perry's recent ethnographic research with white people who attended either multiracial or majority white high schools to argue that the confluence of these three types of knowledge is necessary to transform white racial praxis because it produces a relational understanding of self and "other, "and, by extension, race, racism, and antiracist practice. (shrink)

Critical Pragmatics develops three ideas: language is a way of doing things with words; meanings of phrases and contents of utterances derive ultimately from human intentions; and language combines with other factors to allow humans to achieve communicative goals. In this book, Kepa Korta and John Perry explain why critical pragmatics provides a coherent picture of how parts of language study fit together within the broader picture of human thought and action. They focus on issues about singular reference, that (...) is, talk about particular things, places or people, which have played a central role in the philosophy of language for more than a century. They argue that attention to the 'reflexive' or 'utterance-bound' contents of utterances sheds new light on these old problems. Their important study proposes a new approach to pragmatics and should be of wide interest to philosophers of language and linguists. (shrink)

The problem of collective action is that each member of a group wants other members to make necessary sacrifices while he or she 'free rides', reaping the benefits of collective action without doing the work. Inevitably the end result is that no one does the work and the common interest is not realized. This book analyses the social pressure whereby groups solve the problem of collective action. The authors show that the problem of collective action requires a model of group (...) process and cannot be deduced from simple models of individual behaviour. They employ formal mathematical models to emphasize the role of small subgroups of especially motivated individuals who form the 'critical mass' that sets collective action in motion. The book will be read with special interest by sociologists, social psychologists, economists and political scientists. It will also be of concern to those in industrial relations and communications research working on issues in collective action and rational choice. (shrink)

Is ethics about happiness? Aristotle thought so and for centuries Christians agreed, until utilitarianism raised worries about where this would lead. In this volume, Peter Singer, leading utilitarian philosopher and controversial defender of infanticide and euthanasia, addresses this question in conversation with Christian ethicists and secular utilitarians. Their engagement reveals surprising points of agreement and difference on questions of moral theory, the history of ethics, and current issues such as climate change, abortion, poverty and animal rights. The volume explores the (...) advantages and pitfalls of basing morality on happiness; if ethics is teleological, is its proper aim the subjective satisfaction of preferences? Or is human flourishing found in objective goods: friendship, intellectual curiosity, meaningful labour? This volume provides a timely review of how utilitarians and Christians conceive of the good, and will be of great interest to those studying religious ethics, philosophy of religion and applied ethics. (shrink)

One of the hottest topics in business today is competitive intelligence, the effort by a company to obtain enough information about its competitors to give it a strategic edge over them in the marketplace. During the past decade, a number of books have been written in this country advising business managers on how to mine various sources of public information for this purpose: trade shows, public speeches by company executives, articles in obscure journals, and government agencies like the Food and (...) Drug Administration. Some large companies have even hired former FBI and CIA personnel to help them develop more effective in-house intelligence-gathering capabilities. (shrink)

Computers, the internet, and the larger communications network of which it is a part, provide an informational structure within which many of us spend a large part of our working day and a significant part of our leisure. We are, during those periods, “infonauts in cyberspace,” using the internet to get information from places near and remote, and acting in various ways through the internet to have an effect on computers and people in those places. This cyberspace revolution is changing (...) the human condition in fundamental ways. These changes have the potential to reduce differences between disabled and nondisabled individuals. As infonauts, none of us receives the information we need directly from our senses, nor do we produce the effects we intend directly by use of our limbs. We all depend on technology to aid our senses and magnify and transform the effects of our movements. Neither the blind person nor the quadriplegic nor the sighted mobile employee can access the latest government regulations or send instructions to colleagues in distant places without the help of the internet. The difference between.. (shrink)

It was once common to regard ASL as less than a full-fledged language, as a mere combination of miming, pointing and a few primitive gestures. That conception of ASL was laid to rest by William Stokoe’s landmark work [22] and much careful research that has come in its wake. This work..

The English expression “self” is a modest one; in its normal use, it is not even quite a word, but something that makes an ordinary object pronoun into a reflexive one: “her” into “herself,” “him” into “himself” and “it” into “itself”. The reflexive pronoun is used when the object of an action or attitude is the same as the subject of that action or attitude. If I say Mark Twain shot _himself _in the foot, I describe Mark Twain not only (...) as the shooter but as the person shot; if I say Mark Twain admired _himself, _I describe him not only as the admirer but as the admired. In this sense, “the self” is just the person doing the action or holding the attitude that is somehow in question. “Self” is also used as a prefix for names of activities and attitudes, identifying the special case where the object is the same as the agent: self-love, self-hatred, self-abuse, self-promotion, self-knowledge. (shrink)

Philosophy studies the relation between random, routine, and reflective thought and action. It is in essence the reflective study of routine. No one can survive a random world, but a routine world will generate the same randomness it is intended to avoid owing to the inevitable errors associated with routines. The prime function of reflective inquiry is to identify and explain the logical foundation of these errors. While governments depend on strict routine to prevent anarchy, it is only with the (...) maintenance and adaptive revision of those routines that they are able to serve that purpose. Thus philosophy is essential even to preserve routine, aside from facilitating the building of better routines. To advance global understanding philosophers need to use informal means to communicate to all people everywhere the distinction between randomness and routine, and the transcending of routine by reflective study. I add a concluding note of advocacy for UNESCO’s Strategy on Philosophy. (shrink)

The movement and its members.--H. C. Brokmeyer.--W. T. Harris.--Denton J. Snider.--Bibliography.

Kaplan says that monsters violate Principle 2 of his theory. Principle 2 is that indexicals, pure and demonstrative alike, are directly referential. In providing this explanation of there being no monsters, Kaplan feels his theory has an advantage over double-indexing theories like Kamp’s or Segerberg’s (or Stalnaker’s), which either embrace monsters or avoid them only by ad hoc stipulation, in the sharp conceptual distinction it draws between circumstances of evaluation and contexts of utterance. We shall argue that Kaplan’s prohibition is (...) also essentially stipulative, and that it is too general. The main difference between ourselves and Kaplan is that the basic carriers of a truth-value is a sentence-in-a-context; our account is utterance-based. (shrink)

Deeply original, inspiring to some, abhorrent to others, George Berkeley’s philosophy of immaterialism is still influential three hundred years after the publication of his most widely read book, _Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. _Berkeley published the _Dialogues _because of the unenthusiastic reception of his _Principles of Human Knowledge _in 1710._ _He hoped the use of the_ _dialogue format would win a more favorable hearing, but unfortunately for Berkeley, the response was every bit as scathing as the reception of his (...) previous work. In recent decades, Berkeley’s work has been recognized as an excellent introduction to the English philosophy of the eighteenth century, and to philosophy in general. This edition of the dialogues is accessibly organized by David Hilbert and John Perry. (shrink)