Background: Engaging in end-of-life care considerations is beneficial when the time is right. The purpose of this study is to provide a valid instrument to assess peoples readiness for end-of-life conversations before they are initiated.Materials and Methods: A community sample was recruited in study one for exploratory factor analysis of a 13-item questionnaire. In study two, psychometric properties were analyzed with structural equation modeling in a population affected by cancer. Convergent and discriminant validity were assessed with questionnaires measuring distress, depression, (...) anxiety, fear of progression, and distress of death and dying.Results: In study one exploratory factor analysis resulted in three subscales readiness, communication, and values with a possible common factor for a community sample. In study two the three-factor solution with 13 items was not supported for cancer patients. Factor structure was adapted to 12 items with one common factor readiness. Model fit was good: χ2 = 59.18, p>0.05, with χ2/df = 1.184, rRMSEA = 0.053, and rSRMR = 0.072. Convergent validity was supported by moderate correlations to trait gratitude, ratings of readiness to provide a living will or talk with family about the end of life. Divergent validity was supported by no or small correlation with distress, depression, general and death anxiety and fear of progression, respectively.Conclusions: Results support usage of the REOLC Scale in different settings with adapted factor structure. The questionnaire is interpreted as valid and reliable instrument to assess objective readiness for end-of-life conversations. (shrink)

This paper sets out to conduct an embodied and situated aural analysis of what silence in Northern Norway is about, with the aim of bringing forward the background noise. The paper brings together theories on construction of the rural, time-space relations, soundscape ecology, and on affect and power, and it merges academic traditions about how to communicate findings from non-visual biased studies. This interdisciplinary framework provides a novel structure for both analysing material and communicating findings from embodied studies of listening (...) out. The study found that silence in Northern Norway is about not listening to the economy of scale, to the commodification of the natural conditions and the suppression of lifestyles and territory. The paper illustrates how power is an inherent part of listening and how listening is a practice that is enacted to create emotions that are associated with a specific time-space relation. (shrink)

"A celebrated master of the spoken as well as the written word, Isaiah Berlin here gives us a rare memoir in the form of a dialogue." "Isaiah Berlin is renowned the world over for his analysis of the ideas that have influenced or transformed societies. He has a deep commitment to liberty and pluralism, and has devoted the half century and more of his professional life as a teacher and lecturer to exploring the conditions that allow these ideals (...) to flourish, and those that threaten them." "Berlin here intersperses insights into the development of his ideas and political philosophy with rich personal reminiscences. He discusses Machiavelli, Marx, Vico, Herder, and Herzen, among others, and their influence over him." "As he leads us from Petrograd to Oxford, Washington, Moscow, London, and Jerusalem, he speaks of his friends and contemporaries: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Igor Stravinsky, A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, and many others. He tells of his moving encounters with Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Chaim Weizmann, and of his passion for music and literature." "Frank and engaging, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin is a remarkable record of one of the great intellectual odysseys of our time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Pia Becker entwirft eine Konzeption von Patientenautonomie, die sich im Gegensatz zu in der Medizinethik bisher dominierenden Konzeptionen an der grundsätzlichen Fähigkeit des Patienten zur Autonomie orientiert. Ausgangspunkt bildet die Notwendigkeit der informierten Einwilligung, die neben der Patientenautonomie vor allem auch die körperliche Integrität des Patienten schützt. Als Adäquatheitsbedingungen dienen die beiden normativen Funktionen der Patientenautonomie als Barriere und Schlüssel einer medizinischen Behandlung. Diese Konzeption von Patientenautonomie hat den Vorteil, Patienten besser vor Überforderungen zu bewahren und deren Bedarf an Unterstützungsangeboten (...) zur Förderung der Patientenautonomie deutlicher hervorzuheben. (shrink)

The boundary work approach has been established as one of the main ways to study controversies in science. However, it has been proposed that it does not meet the power dynamics of the scientific field sufficiently. This article concentrates on the intertwining of boundary work and power. It combines the boundary work approach developed by Thomas Gieryn and the analysis of power in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Based on a literature review and an analysis of a controversy over therapeutic (...) touch, it finds four forms of boundary work: intradisciplinary, interdisciplinary, between science and society, and between science and other knowledge systems. The article shows how the different forms of boundary work reveal multiple power struggles, hierarchisations and tensions. The controversy appeared in Finnish nursing science when the Finnish Association of Sceptics gave its annual Humbug Award to a book on therapeutic touch. The book was based on a master’s thesis at the University of Tampere department of nursing science. The nursing scholars in the department reacted abruptly and banned certain books, which astonished the students, and a lively public debate followed. In the debate, nursing science was both defended and challenged. The framework of the study shows that the boundary work approach can be used to study different aspects of power. The article proposes that the framework could be used in other controversies as well to study the layers of power in boundary work. (shrink)

This article contributes to the current discussion on interdisciplinarity in the health research field. It focuses on the relationship between nursing research and gender research. Nursing research is a ‘health sciences’ field which draws from the social sciences, the humanities, and biomedicine. Previous research shows the difficulties that social scientists face in their efforts to integrate with biomedical scientists. The aim of this article is to analyse nursing researchers’ views about one potential collaboration partner in the social sciences and humanities: (...) gender research. The study draws its theoretical insights from research within the sociology of science. It uses ideas about the intertwining of power and knowledge, which is especially emphasised in the works of Pierre Bourdieu. The research material consists of 180 abstracts of nursing research articles that argue in some way about the relationship between nursing research and gender research. The Scopus database was selected because it covers nursing research in a broad sense. The scope of the study is long. The close reading of abstracts is inspired by rhetorical discourse analysis. We found three clearly different but also overlapping discourses that justified gender perspectives in nursing research: Gender research helps to highlight the socio-political context in nursing research; Gender research develops or reforms the nursing research tradition; and Gender research exists as a form of critique within nursing research. Most of the nursing research abstracts regard gender research positively for both external and internal reasons. The abstracts also demonstrate the tensions in the relationship and discuss the views and reasons that generate scepticism towards gender research in nursing research. (shrink)

It is often suggested that during development the brain barriers are immature. This argument stems from teleological interpretations and experimental observations of the high protein concentrations in fetal cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and decreases in apparent permeability of passive markers during development. We argue that the developmental blood–CSF barrier restricts the passage of lipid‐insoluble molecules by the same mechanism as in the adult (tight junctions) rendering the paracellular pathway an unlikely route of entry. Instead, we suggest that both protein and passive (...) markers are transferred across the epithelium through a transcellular route. We propose that changes in volume of distribution can largely explain the decrease in apparent permeability for passive markers and that developmentally regulated cellular transfer explains changes in CSF protein concentrations. The blood–CSF tight junctions are functionally mature from very early in development, and it appears that transfer from blood into embryonic brain occurs predominately via CSF rather than the vasculature. BioEssays 30:237–248, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Salvador Piá Tarazona’s book, El hombre como ser dual is an important methodical-thematic advance in the research of transcendental anthropology as much as it does not detain its focus on human nature nor its development , but rather on th readicality of personal intimacy and its openness to transcendence.

Within the caring science paradigm, variations of a method of interpretation inspired by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's theory of interpretation are used. This method consists of several levels of interpretation: a naïve reading, a structural analysis, and a critical analysis and discussion. Within this paradigm, the aim of this article is to present and discuss a means of creating distance in the interpretation and the text structure by using narration in a poetic language linked to the meaning of the (...) text. Ricoeur's ‘Hermeneutical function of distanciation’ will be introduced, and this concept of distanciation will be illustrated with reference to narrations from a study of patient's life experiences living with chronic illness and home mechanical ventilation in Denmark. Distanciation in the interpretation objectifies the text, and narration in a poetic language creates a particular kind of mediation in the interpretation. That narration represents an interpreted understanding of the whole, which facilitates an appropriate and evocative presentation of the interpreted data. This way of objectifying the text through narration can contribute yet another perspective to Ricoeur's rich and varied theory of interpretation. (shrink)

This article examines the media representation of Swedish elite sport from the end of the 1960s until the present day in terms of objectification, sexualization and pornification. During this period, Sweden became one of the world’s most gender-equal countries. Applying a critical qualitative textual analysis, the article shows that the media discourse on gender and sport is, however, not equal. Even if the discourse over time has become less condescending and less explicitly sexist, there are still more or less subtle (...) allusions to women as a sex. From the latter half of the 1990s onwards, it is possible to talk of a pornification of sport which is strongly linked to market adjustment and commercialization. Since pornification affects women to a greater extent, the media image of Swedish elite sport becomes a bastion for the reproduction of inequality. (shrink)

This innovative volume will be welcomed by moral and political philosophers, social scientists, and anyone who reflects seriously on the twentieth century's heavy burden of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other evidence of people's desire to harm one another. María Pía Lara brings together a provocative set of essays that reexamine evil in the context of a "postmetaphysical" world, a world that no longer equates natural and human evil and no longer believes in an omnipotent God. The question of how (...) and why God permits evil events to occur is replaced by the question of how and why humans perform radically evil acts. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration gathers tributes, reflections, and commentaries on the great thinker and his philosophy, politics, and life-including contributions from Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, Ronald Dworkin, Stephen Spender, and many others. "Some [essays], like Joseph Brodsky's tribute, are touchingly personal. Others, like G. A. Cohen's 'Isaiah's Marx, and Mine,' mingle personal reminiscences with a more theoretical look at Berlin's ideas. . . . The volume is a fitting tribute to a thinker famed for his erudition, eclecticism, and (...) clarity of style."--Merle Rubin, The Christian Science Monitor "One of the many merits of this rich and rewarding collection is the sense-very imperfectly conveyed here-it transmits of the tone of Berlin's writings and conversation, of the multiplicity of his interests and the variety of his achievements. . . . The essays testify to the character of Berlin's mind as a luminous prism, in which the cultural traditions of Russia, England and Judaism are marvelously refracted."--John Gray, Times Literary Supplement "[T]he collection testifies to the learning and profundity of Berlin's thought and, by way both of reminiscence and influence, to the charm and gaity of its expression."--Anthony Quinton, The Times of London. (shrink)

In this article I deal with Kant's concept of reflective judgment, and recover it through its links to the aesthetic dimension as its fundamental scenario. Then I go on to explain why Hannah Arendt understood this important Kantian connection, and why she thought it would allow her to develop it through a political dimension. Last, having reviewed both Kant and Arendt's contributions to the concept of reflective judgment, I recover my own input to the concept by showing its linguistic dimension (...) based on the Heideggerian notion of world-disclosure. With this in mind, I show how the concept of reflective judgment is the most suitable to analyze evil actions. (shrink)

Restoring our biological cycles to heal ourselves, our culture, and our planet Shows how, just like the tides and the moon phases, both women and men have biological cycles of growth and renewal necessary for healthy bodies and minds. Explains how the seclusion of women during menstruation and of men during vision quests offers a cleansing process for body and mind to awaken innate creativity and sensitivity, re-attune us with the deeper rhythms of the body and nature, and restore harmony (...) between the divine feminine and divine masculine. Reveals how the need for sacred retreat was forgotten when the divine feminine was suppressed by patriarchal culture. All of life is interwoven into a living system of cycles, from Earth's seasons to the enzymatic pathways that provide energy to a cell. Waxing and waning from times of growth to times of rest, renewal, and healing, cycles map the most auspicious time for everything in life. Both women and men have biological cycles of active growth and quiet renewal, led by our hormones. By understanding how everything in life moves in cycles, you can become more aware of and comfortable with your own cyclic nature, something that has been forgotten by the modern world's linear views of time. Drawing on the wisdom of ancient cultures, the natural cycles of life, and her own groundbreaking research, Pia Orleane, Ph.D., offers a template for how we can restore balance to our emotions and health, ease tensions between the sexes, and heal our fractured culture by honoring divine feminine consciousness and re-embracing natural cycles, including our innate need for rest and retreat. She explains the biology of how our bodies operate by hormones released in cycles and shows how balanced hormones help eliminate anger, depression, insomnia, anxiety, and fatigue. Exploring ancient traditions and rituals surrounding blood and sacred retreat, she explains how the seclusion of women during menstruation and of men during vision quests offered a cleansing process for body and mind, alone time to clear suppressed emotions, awaken our innate creativity and sensitivity, re-attune us with the deeper rhythms of the body and nature, and restore harmony between the genders and balance between the divine feminine and masculine. Outlining the sacred retreat process, the author explores dream cycles, divine sexuality, and practices for reconnecting to nature, increasing creativity and intuition, and clearing suppressed emotions. She also looks at the benefits for women and men of separate sleeping during menstruation. Through this wisdom, we can restore our natural cycles, allow the divine feminine to once again blossom alongside the divine masculine, and, with the return of balance, heal our world and our hearts. (shrink)

Democracy is increasingly being challenged, by disengagement and by anti-pluralist movements (Levitsky and Ziblatt in How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, Viking, New York, 2018; Wikforss in _Därför demokrati. Om kunskapen och folkstyret_ [Because of this, democracy. On knowledge and people’s rule] Fri Tanke, 2021; Svolik et al. in J Democr 34(1):5–20, 2023). This article draws upon a theoretical discussion about democracy, pluralism, and threats to democracy. Departing from Dewey, Laclau, Mouffe, Young and Allen, we address democracy (...) as an ideology that centers around pluralism, or an ever-increasing inclusion of voices from the margins as its goal. We argue that perceiving democracy pedagogically as a pluralistic ideology would support students’ democratic citizenship and equip them for a world where threats to democracy are being reported. Employing a case study on Finnish social studies textbooks, we analyze how democracy as well as threats to democracy are discursively portrayed. Our study shows that the textbooks present democracy as predominantly institutional and static. We also find that while disengagement is portrayed as a problem for democracy, anti-pluralist movements are generally not referred to as a threat. Additionally, we examine a discourse in the textbooks that connects freedom of speech with democracy in a way that favors a multitude of opinions, even antidemocratic ones, over creating space for marginalized voices. Drawing on the theoretical discussion and the results of the analysis, we argue that a focus on pluralism as the core of democracy makes the opposition between restricting hate speech and advocating for democracy redundant. (shrink)

Developing virtues requires attending to the affective and cognitive components of virtue. The former component implies cultivating apt emotional responses to specific situations. The cognitive part requires the (meta) virtue of phronesis. In dealing with “Phronesis in educating emotions,” this article attends to the nature of emotions and phronesis as its role in cultivating good action habits and virtuous emotional habits. It understands emotion regulation as one of the functions of phronesis. In the broader sense, phronesis includes elements other than (...) deliberation, such as dialectics and rhetoric, which can be helpful to induce a certain suspicion or to persuade somewhat since our affectivity is susceptible to persuasion (i.e. Aristotle’s political dominion of emotions). As a topic in the intersection of moral psychology and moral philosophy, we get valuable insights into a psychologist’s work, Magda Arnold’s (1903–2002) emotion theory. Her understanding of emotion elicitation elucidates the relation between phronesis and emotions. The article focuses on one of the central elements of emotion elicitation, the appraisal. This piece can make the education of emotions for virtue development more understandable. At first glance, our initial appraisal may be hasty and inaccurate, leading to emotional reactions. However, with careful reflection, we can correct and improve upon our initial appraisal and subsequent emotions. If our initial assessment was flawed, this second, more thoughtful evaluation can be enhanced through phronesis. Due to the appraisal’s spontaneity, cultivating educated emotions requires values’ teaching, learning, and thus, appraising good things. With the development of virtues, intuitive estimates become adequate, so emotional responses are more attuned to diverse situations. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 13, Issue 4, Page 277-281, October 2021.

One challenge to the concept of human dignity is that it is a rootless notion invoked simply to mask inequalities that inevitably exist between human beings. This privileging of humans is speciesist and its weak point is the profoundly disabled human being. This article argues that far from being a weak point, the profoundly disabled person is a source of strength and witness to the intrinsic dignity that all human beings have by virtue of being human. The disabled represent the (...) reality of human existence that is both strong and fragile. Although human dignity can be understood philosophically its depth is rooted in Christian theological insights. The profoundly disabled occupy a privileged position and share in a theology of mission since they testify to the interdependence of every human being and human dependence on God to a myopic world that only values strength, autonomy and independence. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 185-203 DOI 10.1558/hrge.v17i2.185 Authors Pia Matthews, Theology, Philosophy, and History, St Mary’s University College, Waldegrave Road, Strawberry Hill, TW1 4SX Journal Human Reproduction & Genetic Ethics Online ISSN 2043-0469 Print ISSN 1028-7825 Journal Volume Volume 17 Journal Issue Volume 17, Number 2 / 2011. (shrink)

In responding to Mathias Beck's thought-provoking article, it seems helpful to begin with an outline and comments on Beck's case as I understand it. For me, this overview throws up three problematic areas that I explore further under the headings of 1. examining the New Testament evidence, 2. sin as disobedience, and 3. obedience, grace, and freedom. Clearly, the author's thoughts in all their nuances are not always adequately accessible in translation. Nevertheless, I hope that I have grasped the main (...) thread of his argument. If I am right in my interpretation then Beck still has work to do to clarify and make explicit what is not only barely implicit but what is obscured by his central theme: that obedience to God's will is the mainstay of our relationship to God. (shrink)

Traditional interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of perception mainly focus on uncovering the underlying mechanisms that are at stake when perceivers are affected by sensible qualities. Investigating the nature of sense perception is one of Aristotle’s main worries and one that he explicitly relates to the question of its causes (e. g.Sens. 436a16–17, 436b9) and its ends (e. g.de An. 434a30 ff.). Therefore I suggest that, in order to fully explain Aristotle’s view of perceptual phenomena, the possibilities, the constraints, and the (...) goals defined by the embodied and situated engagement of perceivers with the external world must be taken into account. Accordingly, in this paper, I provide an affective reading of Aristotle’s theory of perception. I shall ask what, in addition to functioning sense organs and appropriate response mechanisms, the perceiver contributes to perceptual content. Specifically, I propose to shed light on the significance of perceptual experience for the perceiver and I aim to show that, according to Aristotle, one’s biological and personal qualities are perceptually relevant, meaning that they underpin perception, rather than coming into play after perception has occurred and its objects have been discerned. The paper is divided into two parts, respectively dealing with sensory affections and more complex affective phenomena. As regards the domain of primal sense perception, I will focus on smell as a representative example: since Aristotle identifies it as the least developed of human sensory faculties, it will serve as a revealing illustration of how sense perception is informed and qualified by what, drawing on contemporary philosophical terminology, I will call ‘perceptual interests’, viz. the affective sense of what is at stake in the living being’s interaction with the environment. I will then proceed to consider the way more complex affective phenomena underpin perception by examining the case of emotions and that of virtues of character. By showing how perception is affectively inflected and how emotion is rooted in perception’s bodily nature, I aim to sketch out the general lines along which I believe that the Aristotelian theory of perception should be approached. (shrink)

The place of emotions in aesthetic response has long been a topic in contemporary philosophical theorizing. One aspect of the debate in particular seems to have become a recalcitrant problem: when experiencing fiction, we experience emotional reactions towards what we know not to exist. Is this rational? In fact, is it even possible? This article deals with the so‐called “paradox of fiction” from the viewpoint of ancient poetics. In the first section, I survey some of the main arguments proposed to (...) (dis)solve the paradox in analytic philosophy. In the second and the third sections, I address what I consider two problematic assumptions of existing analytic approaches: their prescriptive, “essentialist” attitude and their exclusive focus on matters of content. By offering a brief sketch of the ancient principles of “likelihood” and “vividness”, I argue that they provide a direct and cognitively realistic answer to the paradox insofar as they account for the neutralization of doxastic features in imaginative acts and ground affective responses to fiction in the phenomenon of “aesthetic immersion”, explained in experiential, rather than representational, terms. (shrink)

This essay belongs to a more extended work focused on the idea of what is needed to begin globalizing justice. It is an essay that focuses on the normative conditions needed for a global public sphere. It is a historical reconstruction of how certain forms of communication in global times have ..

The subject of gender violence is complex because our conceptions of what constitutes violence have historically evolved. Therefore, I propose that we should try to understand gender violence neither in abstract nor in essentialist ways, but within historical frameworks and through concrete examples. In this essay I will focus on a historical genealogy of our moral views about gender violence, and, in particular, on the figure of what we call today “rape.” The question of rape is but one example of (...) the long history of gender violence. However, this example is important to understand how violence and gender violence are related to specific conceptions of political and sexual sovereignty. My claim is that we need to pay attention to how is it possible to understand the role of imagination to interpret gender violence nowadays. My conclusion is that the moral filters that configure our “feminist imaginary” have changed our views about rape. (shrink)

This paper deals with Claudia Card's important contributions to a theory of evil that steps out from traditional models of thinking about this problem . Instead, our author seeks to explore important elements from other theorists in order to build up her ideas of what she calls the "atrocity paradigm." This critical essay focuses mainly in the spaces where Card's conclusions need to rethink the limits and constraints of her theory.

Resumen: Spinoza afirma que las decisiones, elecciones y acciones de un agente son necesarias porque están determinadas causalmente. ¿Acaso los seres humanos no son agentes morales? ¿son sólo eslabones de una cadena de causas cuyo curso no pueden controlar y que los exime de las consecuencias de sus actos, así como de premios y castigos? ¿ser un individuo libre significa aceptar pasivamente lo que ocurre y abandonar la pretensión de modificarlo? Este artículo responde a estas preguntas mediante la distinción en (...) la obra spinoziana de dos conceptos de libertad, la verdadera libertad y el libre albedrío, así como con la distinción entre la responsabilidad civil fundada en el concepto de potestas humana -y no en la verdadera libertad, aunque la posibilita-.: Spinoza sustains that the agents' decisions are necessary because they are causally determined. But then, are humans really moral agents? Is it possible that they are only passengers in a train of causes, whose course they cannot control and exempts them from the consequences of their acts, of reward or punishment? Is accepting whatever happens and quitting the aspiration of changing things the hallmark of the free man? This paper answers these questions by distinguishing two concepts of freedom, real freedom and free will, as well as two concepts of responsibility. Civil responsibility is grounded in free will, whereas moral responsibility is not grounded in true freedom, but in human power. (shrink)

Resumen Este artículo ofrece una lectura de la pintura renacentista según los principios establecidos por Leon Battista Alberti, uno de los primeros teóricos de la perspectiva en cuyo Tratado de pintura se refiere al cuadro como “una ventana abierta a la historia”. El concepto de historia empleado por Alberti, que se presta a numerosas interpretaciones, es abordado a partir de las reflexiones de Erwin Panofsky en torno a la perspectiva como “forma simbólica”, avanzando hacia una hipótesis en torno al carácter (...) simbólico de la configuración y representación del tiempo en el cuadro-ventana albertiano.This paper offers a reading of the renaissance painting according to the principles established by Leon Battista Alberti, one of the first theorists of perspective in painting which Trattato della pittura define the frame of the painting as “an open window into history”. The concept of history employed by Alberti, which lends itself to many interpretations, is approached from the reflections of Erwin Panofsky about the prospect as “symbolic form”, moving towards a hypothesis about the symbolic nature of the configuration and representation of time in the alberti’s window. (shrink)

This article presents a review of the literature on science and religion in Nordic countries. Seventy-seven articles, books, and chapters on the topic were collected from five major scholarly databases between 1997 and 2018. We scrutinized how research in this data set was engaged with social scientific research. Most of the research was not social scientific. It was primarily philosophical, theological, and historical research; very little presented empirical and theoretical social scientific research. The studies reflected societal discussions, bringing out some (...) cultural dimensions and social issues, but not specifically in the Nordic context. Some societal aspects were highlighted, such as ethics and climate change, but these were not necessarily tied to the Nordic societies. We propose that in the Nordic context there seems to be a need for social scientific research on science and religion. This research could use theoretical perspectives from, for instance, sociology, science and technology studies, higher education studies, and anthropological research. (shrink)