This study explored tacit knowledge based on an expert nurse's practice who cares for stroke patients by using the hermeneutic phenomenological approach. The participant (‘Ms. A’) was a nursing researcher and college faculty member involved in the education of advanced practice nurses; her specialty was stroke rehabilitation nursing. She was asked to describe the meaning and value she gained from her memorable nursing experiences. Four interviews—approximately 1 h each—were conducted, and the associated data were interpreted together with the participant based (...) on the method of interpretive circulation. Notably, the analysis was ended when a fusion of horizons was recognized. The participant recalled her nursing experiences based on six model cases. During the analysis, the following five elements were extracted: [belief in the ability of vulnerable people to survive]; [being together]; [respect for human dignity]; [preparedness to respond to and bear suffering together]; and [theoretical knowledge base approaches true understanding of patient experience]. Further, the nursing model—the Roy Adaptation Model—utilized by Ms. A in the process of recognizing humans as whole beings was deeply interpreted and implemented as a guideline for her implicit advanced practice. Moreover, her deep understanding and utilization of theoretical knowledge base also built the foundation for her implicit advanced practice. In conclusion, Ms. A's tacit knowledge and the elements support the process of tacit knowledge acquisition. Her narratives, hermeneutic attitude as an interpreter, and learning attitude throughout interaction with others will strongly help her knowledge development. We intend to continue the study with multiple participants and explore the structure of tacit knowledge possessed by advanced practitioners. Future endeavours will include the development of a tacit knowledge learning strategy. (shrink)

What is pragmatism's contribution, actual or potential, to contemporary International Relations theory and practice? Is there hope for constructing a pragmatist theory of International Relations? The author of this article takes up these questions by considering whether Barack Obama is a pragmatist in his handling of issues in international affairs. By examining a series of Obama speeches, the author teases out the raw material for a pragmatist theory of International Relations, demonstrating how the pragmatic practice of international diplomacy (...) can inform a pragmatist theory of International Relations. (shrink)

Analysis of Barack Obama's rhetorical strategies.

In US history, much human rights policy developed in four waves during the twentieth century. These waves were triggered by similar circumstances, but all proved short-lived as structural constraints such as limited US power over other countries’ domestic actions, competing US policy priorities, a US hesitance to join multilateral institutions, and the continued domestic political weakness of human rights advocates led to setbacks. As Barack Obama took office, his campaign comments and the past patterns led to widespread expectations that (...) he would introduce new human rights initiatives. His policies, though, would continue to face the structural constraints and would be affected by the Bush administration’s legacy. It was predictable that many of Obama’s initiatives would be only partially implemented and only partially successful. As expected, Obama’s first years have seen mixed results, but the Obama administration has advanced US human rights policies sufficiently in half-dozen key areas to say that a fifth wave of human rights policy development is underway. (shrink)

During his first year in office, President Barack Obama has outlined a human rights doctrine. The essence of Obama’s position is that the foreign policy of the USA is dedicated to the promotion of the most basic human right—the right to life—above and beyond all others and that the USA will systematically refrain from actively promoting other rights, even if this merely entails sanctions or raising a moral voice. This article details and examines Obama’s position and assesses (...) its normative standing. (shrink)

By executive order—later passed into law—President Obama closed legal loopholes used to justify torture by his predecessor. Less often discussed, his administration also instituted scientific research into the most effective interrogation techniques. This dual-track approach already demands the use of two different methods to properly discuss the policy, and in this article, a third is put forward for a fuller interdisciplinary view. That is to say, although there are notable shortcomings, scientific and legal developments will be explored to illuminate (...) how he also clarified a moral stance for the nation. Put all together, this article will show that Obama indeed achieved laudable steps towards preventing the reintroduction of torture. (shrink)

On Obama examines some of the key philosophical questions that accompany the historic emergence of the 44th US president. The purpose of the book is to take seriously the once-common thought that Mr. Obama had ushered in a post-historical age. Three questions organize the argument of the book. Has the US become post-racial? Does Obama’s pragmatism show the way to a post-partisan approach to politics? And does the reining in of US power and ambitions signal the emergence (...) of a post-imperial moment? The book does not answer these questions directly, but considers how Mr. Obama’s public image and career raise the questions, and experiments with some lines of thought that emerge in their light. (shrink)

Just War Theorists have neglected that a lack of “just military preparedness” on the side of a country seriously undermines its capability to resort justly to military force. In this paper, I put forth five principles of “just military preparedness” and show that since the new Obama administration will seek to maintain the United States’ dominant military position in the world, it will violate each of the principles. I conclude on this basis that we should anticipate that the (...) class='Hi'>Obama administration will add another page to the United States’ history of unjust military interventions. (shrink)

With much talk of President Obama’s pragmatism, there is good reason to explore what this means in terms of his commitments and his policies. When we call Obama a pragmatist, is this merely a way of saying he selects policies and makes decisions that work, quite independent and sometimes against principles he may hold? Or, do we mean to point to something more robust—a kind of pragmatism that emphasizes experimentalism as a cooperative venture, that locates principles in and (...) assesses their worth based on background experiential conditions, that eschews epistemic and practical certainty for fallibilism, that is oriented by a chastened hope, and that is committed to public deliberation as essential to democratic.. (shrink)

The paper attempts to philosophically assess the recent U.S. presidential race and to look at some aspects of the underlying beliefs of Barack Obama that aided him in his campaign. The philosophical framework used in order to interpret the political events are mainly from the Critical Theory of Theodor W. Adorno and the neo-Marxist approach of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Further observations will concentrate on the logic and attraction of the electoral process and the dialectical logic of Sarah (...) Palin’s statements. The first part will discuss the form of U.S. electoral politics, especially the perpetual campaign, whereas the second part will put the policies of the next U.S. president into a philosophical context. (shrink)

This article considers the speech given by then Senator Barack Obama on race in America, on the collective trauma he is pointing to and the need for working through and what that means in psychoanalytic and pragmatic terms. Though Obama may have only tangentially been alluding to a Freudian notion of working through and probably was not thinking of John Dewey's work, the insights of that speech can be deepened by drawing on both psychoanalytic theory and American pragmatism's (...) attention to transactions, habits, and environing conditions. (shrink)

President Barack Obama has clearly placed himself in the just war tradition, and so we may ask how successful has President Obama in fact been as just war theorist? His justification of the recent NATO intervention in Libya shows that the record is at best mixed. More broadly, Obama’s failure as just war theorist is at least partly a failure of the theory itself: as long as this theory does not address issues of “just military preparedness,” it (...) will fail to place real constraints on American resort to military force. (shrink)

In early work, I argued that Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, often represented, in his political speeches and writings, a form of philosophical pragmatism with special relations to the University of Chicago and its reform tradition. That form of pragmatism, especially evident in the work of such early figures as John Dewey and Jane Addams, and such later figures as Saul Alinsky, Abner Mikva, David Greenstone, Richard Rorty, Danielle Allen, and Cass Sunstein, contributed greatly to (...) the intellectual atmosphere that Obama breathed during his many years in Chicago as a community organizer, senior lecturer in the University of Chicago Law School, and emerging figure in Illinois politics. And that form of pragmatism has, from Dewey to Obama, been keenly concerned to appropriate for its purposes the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. My purpose in this essay is to set out these filiations in ways more accessible to a global audience, and to carry the story forward through the opening moves of the Obama presidency. Key Words: Obama • pragmatism • optimism • pessimism • community • rhetoric • political philosophy. (shrink)

Referring to the mainstream studies based on the personalization’s hypothesis, which positively evaluates signals of dominance shown by leaders, the analysis of Obama’s rhetoric stays a relevant exception. His risky recall, during his political talks, of his social difficulties as a child of a mixed couple was in fact one of the more surprising aspects of his success. Nevertheless, reactions to his autobiographical sharing were scarcely explored. Based on the idea that these self-disclosures signal his responsivity toward the audience (...) of low social condition and can, therefore, be defined as a sign of humility, this research aims to test if coherence between Obama’s words and his facial expressions of contempt, due to the seriousness of social injustices endured in his childhood, may influence the receivers’ perception of such unexpected communication. Before reading a brief autobiographical sharing taken from a “Back-to-school” speech, a highly ritualized monolog the US President addresses each year to students, 175 Italian participants were presented with a photo of Obama displaying either an expression of contempt or a neutral expression. Comparisons between self-assessments of perceptions and reactions of participants assigned to the two experimental conditions show that a facial expression of contempt, coherent with words describing his school difficulties, has been crucial for perceiving this humble political discourse as authentic and not as a simple socially desirable posturing. More studies seem to be needed, however, to understand how humble speech could enhance the positive face of leaders or backfire against them. (shrink)

I make the case for thinking of Obama as a pragmatist, talk about the influence of his community organizing experience, and then reflect on some difficulties of implementing those "pragmatic democratic" values as president. I call attention to some arguably pragmatic but undemocratic features of his presidency, notably, a tendency to technocratic and top-down management. In response to complaints about Obama from a politically liberal orientation, I will defend his actions as pragmatic.

Mark S. Ferrara’s principle scholarly interests lie within the fields of religious studies and Asian philosophy, as indicated on his State University of New York–Oneonta English faculty page and demonstrated in his other books Between Noble and Humble: Cao Xueqin and the Dream of the Red Chamber and Palace of Ashes: China and the Decline of American Higher Education. However, it is his interests in rhetoric and political discourse, cultural studies, and world literature that make Barack Obama and the (...) Rhetoric of Hope such an insightful and pleasant contribution to the commentary on and criticism of the outgoing president.... (shrink)

The election of Barack Obama corresponding with the dramatic implosion of the neo-liberal world order of finance, represents a dramatic return of history as attempts are made to forge the new consensus of global capitalism. The financial crisis has come to represent the culmination of Third Way neo-liberalism with Obama signifying the commodity logic and emancipatory potential of the new spirit of capitalism. Obama’s biography has allowed for a self-confident re-articulation of American imperial power, while fetishizing a (...) civil society notion of transformation that has eclipsed the anti-capitalist left. Resistance to Obama’s vision of a reconciled America, leading the moral correction of capitalism, has come in the form of a right wing populist campaign of delegitimization. The Tea Party populists speak to the return of the political and the ontological necessity of antagonism as they present themselves as the only radical alternative to actually existing neo-liberalism. (shrink)

The point of departure for this article is that the current white backlash over the use of the framing device “Black Lives Matter” is a correlate of the diminished capacity to make race-based claims fostered by neoliberal conceptions of race. The article attends to how President Obama, paradoxically, has deepened color-blind forms of racism and thus weakened the ability for grass-roots Black challenges to the discursive and political status quo. His implicit conception of whiteness as invisible, singular and of (...) transcendent power, is discussed as a theo-politics and assessed via two examples: the rhetoric he uses with Black audiences, and his foreign policy choices in Africa. This article hopes both to show that Obama's management of the complex conditions he inherited have not been fruitful for African Americans, the group that offered such unmitigated supported for his campaigns; and to inspire momentum against neoliberal ways of thinking about race and its concomitant color-blind whiteness. (shrink)

The "religious and secular divide" cannot be understood unless we think about the way sex gets mobilized on both sides of this supposed divide. In our joint writing, we have resisted thinking of the religious and the secular as a divide; we have rather been interested to think them relationally—as relations. Thus, the larger suggestion of this paper is that we cannot truly imagine and practice democratic politics—to name some keywords for this discussion—unless we rethink the relations between sex, secularism, (...) and religion. (shrink)

Truth claims pervade the world: assertions that a speaker wishes to persuade an audience are true or at least plausible. But how to judge? Much proposed knowledge has uncertain legitimacy, evaluated through assumptions of how the world operates or by the reputation of its sponsor. In other words, plausibility and credibility shape our judgments. As students of conspiracy theories recognize, many “facts” are available, too many to be easily judged as to their accuracy. Facts are promiscuous. As judges of likelihood, (...) we conclude that some are false, others true, and still others taken out of context. Further, knowledge is never complete and so we must consider error and ignorance (a field of epistemology labeled agnotology) as well as accuracy and awareness. In this article I examine four critical allegations made about United States President Barack Obama: that he was born in Kenya, that he is Muslim, that he engaged in oral sex with another man, and that he is a socialist. While each of these claims may be false, they are false in different ways in light of the different criteria and strategies by which we weigh uncertainty. (shrink)

Transparency isn't the answer to everything, but one lesson I've learned in more than 20 years as an investigative reporter is that it is one critical step in keeping the public a key part of our democratic system and ensuring checks and balances in government. This is a principle shared not only by gadfly journalists themselves, but also by some government officials on the other side of the fish bowl.

Much ink has been spilled on the pros and cons of U.S. president Barack Obama's decision not to strike the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad after that regime launched a deadly chemical weapons attack in 2013. Often missing from those debates, however, are the perspectives of Syrians themselves. While not all Syrians oppose Assad, and not all opponents endorsed intervention, many Syrian oppositionists resolutely called for Obama to uphold his “red line” militarily. As part of the roundtable (...) “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” this essay analyzes diverse expressions of such opinion and finds that they highlight three dimensions of the ethical case for limited strikes against Assad. First, they remind us that the ethical context of the red line question was many Syrians’ sense of abandonment by the international community. Second, they emphasize the ethical stakes of the limited strikes; namely an opportunity to hold the Syrian regime accountable, weaken it from within, and thus change the equation of the war. Third, they make sense of the ethical consequences of the nonintervention outcome, and especially its effect in deepening civilians’ despair, accelerating extremism, and convincing Assad and his allies that they could kill with impunity. These views controvert both legalistic arguments precluding military intervention and assumptions that U.S. intervention is always imperialist and warmongering. In this case, consideration of the case for military intervention from the viewpoint of those on whose behalf the intervention would have taken place challenges us to think deeply about circumstances in which limited strikes might be not only ethically justified but also imperative. (shrink)

On January 18, 2011, President Obama signed Executive Order 13563, Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review, which instructs federal regulators to do the following: coordinate their agencies activities to simplify and harmonize rules that may be overlapping, inconsistent, or redundant; determine whether the present and future benefits of a proposed regulation justify its potential costs (including taking into account both quantitative and qualitative factors); increase participation of industry, experts, and the public (“stakeholders”) in the formal rule‐making process; encourage the use (...) of warnings, default rules, disclosure requirements, and provisions of information to the public as an alternative to traditional “command‐and‐control” rule‐making restricting consumer choice; and mandate a government‐wide review of all existing administrative rules to remove outdated regulations. Executive Order 13563 includes a qualitative “values” provision to be considered in the required cost–benefit analysis, which can potentially counteract the alleged regulatory reform rationale of President Obama. Furthermore, in Executive Order 13563, President Obama established a deadline of May 18, 2011, for all executive branch agencies to submit their plans to streamline their rulemaking operations and repeal those “overlapping, inconsistent, or redundant” rules. These two issues, along with complementary regulatory review proposals being discussed in the U.S. Congress, are evaluated in this essay. (shrink)

With just that much background, let us turn to the so called unipolar moment. Symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, the collapse of the Soviet Union putatively left a unipolar world, with the United States as the sole global superpower and not merely the primary superpower, as it was before.

Truth claims pervade the world: assertions that a speaker wishes to persuade an audience are true or at least plausible. But how to judge? Much proposed knowledge has uncertain legitimacy, evaluate...

President Barack Obama entered office with a promise to change the style and substance of his predecessor's foreign policy. This essay evaluates his efforts by identifying the key policy goals and principled underpinnings of what might be called an Obama Doctrine. I argue that Obama's distinctive worldview, which holds idealism and realism in generative tension, is deeply rooted in Niebuhrian Christian realism yet diverges from it in important ways. I close with a brief articulation of an (...) class='Hi'>Obama Doctrine that reflects the president's perspective on the proper role of American power and influence in the world. (shrink)

I argue that we do not get an adequate picture of society from liberal conceptions of race and racism. What this analysis does, then, is call for a synthesis of historical, social, and cultural insights to inform and enrich the philosophical conception of race and racism.

It is still said, maybe believed in Texas and Alaska, that in the American democracy the people are approximately equal and they are free in choosing and influencing those who govern them and deal with the rest of the world. In fact American democracy is hierarchic democracy. The American people, of course, like any other, is for general purposes rightly thought about in terms of classes somehow understood -- as Americans themselves have lately been saying. The fundamental classes surely are (...) neither equal nor free in choosing and influencing their government. They are instead a hierarchy, ranked from top to bottom. (shrink)

The historical record of an individual depends upon context. The United States of the last decade has suffered a series of crisis that are comparable in some ways to those of Poland in the 1970s. Taken together, they have created a mood of misery, but also the possibility for a hopeful transformation of politics. Barack Obama serves a function in American politics today similar to that served by Karol Wojtyła three decades ago.

The historical record of an individual depends upon context. The United States of the last decade has suffered a series of crisis that are comparable in some ways to those of Poland in the 1970s. Taken together, they have created a mood of misery, but also the possibility for a hopeful transformation of politics. Barack Obama serves a function in American politics today similar to that served by Karol Wojtyła three decades ago.

This article distinguishes two ways in which a pragmatist might approach the relation between Obama's politics and the resources furnished by pragmatist political philosophy. The first way, conceptual pragmatism, specifies pragmatism in terms of conceptual commitments in order to find out whether or not those commitments can be found in Obama. The second path, methodological pragmatism, works to better understand what Obama stands for in terms of the practical consequences of his actions, speeches, and policies. It is (...) argued that contemporary pragmatists too often neglect the methodological approach. (shrink)

Diplomacy is the only sane alternative to the cycle of violence from the Middle East to Central Asia that threatens to engulf the world. A corollary is to recognize that violence only begets violence. It would also help if the Obama administration, and the West, faced up to the unannounced issues that drive policy in the region.