Obtaining informed consent, an ethical obligation of nurses and other health care providers, occurs routinely when patients make health care decisions. The values underlying informed consent (promotion of patients’ well-being and respect for their self-determination) are embedded in the dominant American culture. Nurses who apply the USA’s cultural values of informed consent when caring for patients who come from other cultures encounter some ethical dilemmas. This descriptive study, conducted with Latino, Chinese and Anglo-American cancer patients in a large, public, west-coast (...) clinic, describes constraints on the informed consent process in a multicultural setting, including language barriers, the clinical environment, control in decision making, and conflicting desired health outcomes for health care providers and patients, and suggests some implications for nursing practice. (shrink)

G. E. M. Anscombe’s view that agents know what they are doing “without observation” has been met with skepticism and the charge of confusion and falsehood. Simultaneously, some commentators think that Anscombe has captured an important truth about the first-personal character of an agent’s awareness of her actions. This paper attempts an explanation and vindication of Anscombe’s view. The key to the vindication lies in focusing on the role of practical knowledge in an agent’s knowledge of her actions. Few commentators, (...) with the exception of Moran (2004) and Hursthouse (2000), have gotten the emphasis right. The key to a proper interpretation of Anscombe’s views is to explain her claims within the context of her teleological theory of action. The result is a theory ofintentional action that makes self-knowledge of one’s own actions the norm. (shrink)

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the (...) many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a 'must read' that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture and Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law's representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Australia. (shrink)

A complete collection of Frank Sibley's articles on philosophical aesthetics, this volume includes five, remarkable, hitherto unpublished papers written in Sibley's later years. It addresses many topics, among them the nature of aesthetic qualities versus non-aesthetic qualities, the relation of aesthetic description to aesthetic evaluation, the different levels of evaluation, and the objectivity of aesthetic judgement. The later papers constitute both a significant development of Sibley's individual approach to aesthetics, such as his discussion of the distinction between (...) attributive and predicative uses of adjectives and of the aesthetic significance of tastes and smells, a topic Sibley considered to be much neglected. (shrink)

Introduction to Phenomenology is an outstanding and comprehensive guide to an important but often little-understood movement in European philosophy. Dermot Moran lucidly examines the contributions of phenomenology's nine seminal thinkers: Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Written in a clear and engaging style, this volume charts the course of the movement from its origins in Husserl to its transformation by Derrida. It describes the thought of Heidegger and Sartre, phenomenology's most famous thinkers, and introduces and (...) assesses the distinctive use of phenomenology by some of its lesser-known exponents, such as Levinas, Arendt and Gadamer. Throughout, the enormous influence of phenomenology on the course of twentieth-century philosophy is thoroughly explored. Clearly explaining technical terms and avoiding jargon, Introduction to Phenomenology is an indispensable introduction to the history and substance of this vital current in intellectual thought. (shrink)

In this paper, I recount the history of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies (IJPS), and my role as Founding Editor. The IJPS emerged from the earlier annual Philosophical Studies (Maynooth), founded by Desmond Bastable in 1951 and published regularly until 1988. I took over as Editor from 1989 to 1992 and then began the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

What effect does creativity have on individuals, groups and societies, and on the fundamental values on which they base their actions and institutions? What constitutes good and evil, right and wrong, and how does creativity disrupt these beliefs? The Ethics of Creativity brings together an impressive collaboration of thinkers from several countries and disciplines to illuminate the thorny issues that arise when novel ideas and products brought forth by creativity collide with the rules and norms of what we believe to (...) be 'right' or 'good'. This book tackles questions of why most people claim to love creativity yet, in practice, may quash creative intentions, how creative innovations can create new ethical problems, when creativity and ethics tend to coincide and when they tend to conflict, and how both creativity and ethics might be harnessed to support a brighter future for all. (shrink)

Shen et al.'s (2024) novel 3 × 3 ethical framework aims to facilitate “study-by-study decisions about returning individual research results (IRRs) from digital phenotyping in psychiatry.” The frame...

This chapter explicates Husserl’s transcendental idealism as motivated by his critiques of naturalism and objectivism. The chapter proposes a way of resolving the paradox of transcendental subjectivity, namely: how subjectivity can be both for the world and in the world. Husserl’s idealism has a number of commitments: priority of consciousness over being in the correlation between subjectivity and objectivity; all “meaning and being” depend on transcendental subjectivity; transcendental subjectivity is not a “piece of the world” ; transcendental subjectivity belongs to (...) the open network of intersubjectivity that is cultural and historical. (shrink)

In this article I wish to re-examine the vexed issue of the possibility of idealism in ancient and medieval philosophy with particular reference to the case of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c. 800idealisms immaterialism as his standard for idealism, and it is this decision, coupled with his failure to acknowledge the legacy of German idealism, which prevents him from seeing the classical and medieval roots of idealism more broadly understood.

In this paper I discuss Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological account of the constitution of the social world, in relation to some phenomenological contributions to the constitution of sociality found in Husserl’s students and followers, including Heidegger, Gurwitsch, Walther, Otaka, and Schutz. Heidegger is often seen as being the first to highlight explicitly human existence as Mitsein and In-der-Welt-Sein, but it is now clear from the Husserliana publications that, in his private research manuscripts especially during his Freiburg years, Husserl employs many of (...) the terms associated with Heidegger, e.g. Mitwelt, Weltlichkeit, Alltäglichkeit, Zeitlichkeit, and Geschichtlichkeit, and had detailed discussions of various forms of social constitution. It is clear that Husserl and Heidegger were exploring these themes in dialogue with one another, and that Husserl, in fact, has a rich phenomenology of sociality that is worth exploring in its own right. In this paper, I will outline some of the key aspects of Husserl’s contribution. (shrink)

This article offers an alternative reading of the Abbé Sieyès and the modern ‘nation-state’ problématique. I argue that the subject/object that is constituted in the early days of modernity is the incomplete society: an impossible-possibility ideal of congruency of population, authority and space. I suggest reading this ideal of congruency as a fantasy in that it offers a certain ‘fullness to come’, the promise of jouissance that can never be attained and is thus constantly re-envisioned and reinvoked. Drawing on discourse-analytical (...) and psychoanalytical tools I explain the logic of fantasy before analysing Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate?, as I show how he critiques and fragments the old model of the state and how his reading of the nation is fantasmatic, a continuous project towards impossible congruency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 422-423 [Access article in PDF] Robin Small, editor. A Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Perspectives on a Philosophical Tradition. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001. Pp. xxix + 191. Cloth, $79.95.The stated aim of this collection of thirteen essays (mostly new—four are reprints) by philosophers resident in Australia is to offer selective perspectives on the phenomenological tradition, correcting misunderstandings and highlighting aspects overlooked in (...) standard commentaries. Presumably, it also wants to exhibit contemporary Australian writing in the phenomenological tradition, and situate phenomenological claims in terms graspable by analytic philosophers.Robin Small's introduction, taking Husserl's conception of eidetic intuition as fundamental, sketches the rise of phenomenology. The collection is then divided into three parts. Part One ("Approaching the Sources") focuses on the sources of phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger) and opens with a thoughtful essay by Max Deutscher, reprinted from the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1980), which is replied to by Maurita Harney. Three further, not particularly distinguished, essays deal with the issues of realism, relativism, [End Page 422] and the relation between Ryle and Husserl. Part Two ("Following the Tradition") deals with new themes arising in Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida, while Part Three ("Making Connections") explores the relation between phenomenology and other disciplines, chiefly sociology, anthropology, and literature. A final essay by Jocelyn Dunphy Bloomfield examines the relevance of phenomenology in the Australian context.The collection is interesting but uneven. Some of the essays are out of date: Small's essay on Ryle and Husserl originally appeared in 1981 and Purushottama Bilimoria's paper, "Heidegger and the Japanese Connection," first published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1991), is in need of updating given the upsurge of interest in Husserl in Asia in recent years. Deutscher's "Husserl's Transcendental Subjectivity" is helpful in that it introduces Husserl's transcendental idealism through unusually prosaic analogies. He suggests that the transcendental attitude can be grasped in familiar experiences such as "keeping silence" during an awkward or embarrassing moment or adopting a detached or removed stance. An actor on stage can express anger without being angry. The transcendental attitude is such a detached spectator attitude; it is the capacity we have to judge and appraise ourselves (8). Moreover, it is in this attitude that we come to recognize our commitments to others. Deutscher resists the temptation to separate radically the ordinary living in the world from the detached contemplation of it. There never can be total but only intermittent detachment from the life-world; nevertheless the transcendental epoché is important in that it allows us the chance to gain self-awareness about our situation, about our "forms of life." While Deutscher does a terrific job demystifying one of Husserl's central and much misunderstood concepts, he is at risk of oversimplifying and worse of psychologizing Husserl's insights.Richard Campbell's essay on Heidegger's conception of truth as aletheia is also particularly noteworthy in that it is a philosophically sophisticated attempt to cut through Heidegger's somewhat inflated jargon and expresses his central intuitions about truth. Campbell goes to some trouble to elucidate and disambiguate what Heidegger is saying. Furthermore, he believes Heidegger is wrong in his interpretation of Plato; Plato is doing precisely the opposite of what Heidegger says he is doing. Deutscher's essay on Sartre, informed by an analytic rigor and sensitivity to ambiguity, gives a very clear account and partial defence of the relations between positional consciousness of the object and non-positional self-consciounsess. He is critical of Sartre's sweeping concept of the "in itself" and points out that in reality there are many diverse "in-itselves" with different real properties. Crittenden, too, has an interesting essay on Sartre's conception of "the look." Sartre understands the other as the one who looks at (and thereby seeks to objectify me) whereas for de Beauvoir, the other (in the particular case: woman) is the looked at and objectified. The article on sociology and phenomenology attempts to show the relation between their methods... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 422-423 [Access article in PDF] Robin Small, editor. A Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Perspectives on a Philosophical Tradition. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001. Pp. xxix + 191. Cloth, $79.95.The stated aim of this collection of thirteen essays (mostly new—four are reprints) by philosophers resident in Australia is to offer selective perspectives on the phenomenological tradition, correcting misunderstandings and highlighting aspects overlooked in (...) standard commentaries. Presumably, it also wants to exhibit contemporary Australian writing in the phenomenological tradition, and situate phenomenological claims in terms graspable by analytic philosophers.Robin Small's introduction, taking Husserl's conception of eidetic intuition as fundamental, sketches the rise of phenomenology. The collection is then divided into three parts. Part One ("Approaching the Sources") focuses on the sources of phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger) and opens with a thoughtful essay by Max Deutscher, reprinted from the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1980), which is replied to by Maurita Harney. Three further, not particularly distinguished, essays deal with the issues of realism, relativism, [End Page 422] and the relation between Ryle and Husserl. Part Two ("Following the Tradition") deals with new themes arising in Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida, while Part Three ("Making Connections") explores the relation between phenomenology and other disciplines, chiefly sociology, anthropology, and literature. A final essay by Jocelyn Dunphy Bloomfield examines the relevance of phenomenology in the Australian context.The collection is interesting but uneven. Some of the essays are out of date: Small's essay on Ryle and Husserl originally appeared in 1981 and Purushottama Bilimoria's paper, "Heidegger and the Japanese Connection," first published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1991), is in need of updating given the upsurge of interest in Husserl in Asia in recent years. Deutscher's "Husserl's Transcendental Subjectivity" is helpful in that it introduces Husserl's transcendental idealism through unusually prosaic analogies. He suggests that the transcendental attitude can be grasped in familiar experiences such as "keeping silence" during an awkward or embarrassing moment or adopting a detached or removed stance. An actor on stage can express anger without being angry. The transcendental attitude is such a detached spectator attitude; it is the capacity we have to judge and appraise ourselves (8). Moreover, it is in this attitude that we come to recognize our commitments to others. Deutscher resists the temptation to separate radically the ordinary living in the world from the detached contemplation of it. There never can be total but only intermittent detachment from the life-world; nevertheless the transcendental epoché is important in that it allows us the chance to gain self-awareness about our situation, about our "forms of life." While Deutscher does a terrific job demystifying one of Husserl's central and much misunderstood concepts, he is at risk of oversimplifying and worse of psychologizing Husserl's insights.Richard Campbell's essay on Heidegger's conception of truth as aletheia is also particularly noteworthy in that it is a philosophically sophisticated attempt to cut through Heidegger's somewhat inflated jargon and expresses his central intuitions about truth. Campbell goes to some trouble to elucidate and disambiguate what Heidegger is saying. Furthermore, he believes Heidegger is wrong in his interpretation of Plato; Plato is doing precisely the opposite of what Heidegger says he is doing. Deutscher's essay on Sartre, informed by an analytic rigor and sensitivity to ambiguity, gives a very clear account and partial defence of the relations between positional consciousness of the object and non-positional self-consciounsess. He is critical of Sartre's sweeping concept of the "in itself" and points out that in reality there are many diverse "in-itselves" with different real properties. Crittenden, too, has an interesting essay on Sartre's conception of "the look." Sartre understands the other as the one who looks at (and thereby seeks to objectify me) whereas for de Beauvoir, the other (in the particular case: woman) is the looked at and objectified. The article on sociology and phenomenology attempts to show the relation between their methods... (shrink)

This article argues that Habermas’s formal-pragmatics are better understood as a set of weak-universal dispositions susceptible to erosion over the course of a lifetime, if exposed to continual “disappointing” communicative experiences. Habermas’s rational-reconstructive project to explicate the intuitive rule-consciousness held by competent speakers retains immense theoretical value for analyzing both partisan and mass political discourse, if his emphasis on isolated speech situations is supplemented with a logic of communicative memory better accounting for how disagreement antecedes discourse on the formal-pragmatic register. (...) I argue that Habermas’s concept of the “lifeworld” contains untapped theoretical resources for thinking about the formal-pragmatic consequences of accumulated partisan experiences; namely, how such experiences lead inter-partisan actors to jettison mutual imputations of communicative accountability. I conclude by offering revisions to Habermas’s discourse ethics. Rapport-building intended to alleviate the negative effects of prior accumulated partisan experiences is first necessary if a norm is to enjoy real justification. (shrink)

COVID-19 vaccine refusal seems like a paradigm case of irrationality. Vaccines are supposed to be the best way to get us out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet many people believe that they should not be vaccinated even though they are dissatisfied with the current situation. In this paper, we analyze COVID-19 vaccine refusal with the tools of contemporary philosophical theories of responsibility and rationality. The main outcome of this analysis is that many vaccine-refusers are responsible for the belief that (...) they should not be vaccinated and epistemically rational in holding it. This is an important result because it provides insights into the legitimacy of certain public health policies. In particular, this result shows that a public health policy that would abandon the project of convincing certain vaccine-refusers with reasons – e.g., by simply making vaccination compulsory – is prima facie illegitimate. (shrink)

Mitochondrial bioenergetics plays a key role in multiple basic cellular processes, such as energy production, nucleotide biosynthesis, and iron metabolism. It is an essential system for animals' life and death (apoptosis) and it is required for embryo development. This, in conjunction with its being subjected to adaptive processes in multiple species and its gene products being involved in the formation of reproductive barriers in animals, raises the possibility that mitochondrial bioenergetics could be a candidate genetic mechanism of speciation. Here, we (...) discuss genetic and biochemical evidence for the possible involvement of this unique system, encoded by two genomes (the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes), that differ by an order of magnitude in their mutation rates in processes leading to speciation events. (shrink)

This article explores the themes of trust and ethical conduct in social research, with particular attention to the trust that can develop between the members of a research team as well as between researchers and the researched. The authors draw upon a three-year empirical study of destinations and outcomes for young people excluded from alternative educational provision. They also make reference to a contemporary exposition of Aristotle's writing on friendship in order to explore two sets of relevant distinctions that have (...) a bearing upon our understanding of relationships that emerge in the context of social research projects. These distinctions are between impartiality and selectivity on the one hand, and between universality and particularity on the other. The authors attempt to demonstrate that these distinctions influence the development of trust and the conduct of ethical research, arguing that the latter is not synonymous with compliance to ethical guidelines. (shrink)

The standard view of ignorance is that it consists in the mere lack of knowledge or true belief. Duncan Pritchard has recently argued, against the standard view, that ignorance is the lack of knowledge/true belief that is due to an improper inquiry. I shall call, Pritchard’s alternative account the Normative Account. The purpose of this article is to strengthen the Normative Account by providing an independent vargument supporting it.

This unique volume is an introduction for computer scientists, including a formal study of theoretical algorithms for Big Data applications, which allows them to work on such algorithms in the future. It also serves as a useful reference guide for the general computer science population, providing a comprehensive overview of the fascinating world of such algorithms. To achieve these goals, the algorithmic results presented have been carefully chosen so that they demonstrate the important techniques and tools used in Big Data (...) algorithms, and yet do not require tedious calculations or a very deep mathematical background. (shrink)

Philosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom.

This paper aims to contribute to epistemology by studying the psychoanalytic notion of transference. Contrary to previous philosophical research on Freud, I claim that traditional models of interpretation or translation are insufficient to explain psychoanalytic understanding. After exploring the conceptual roots of this mistake, which I define as generic, I focus on the notion of transference and claim that it should be viewed as a unique form of understanding that enables the emergence of unconscious meaning or truth. I elaborate this (...) claim with a detailed study of the development of this notion in Freud’s texts. Transference is thus delineated as a form of understanding which is closely related to the matrix of love and defined in relation to the following parameters: intersubjectivity; visuality; and performativity. (shrink)

"Deleuze plonge la critique kantienne transcendantale dans le bain dissolvant d'un empirisme renouvelé. Ce livre se propose de restituer cette entreprise, et d'analyser l'étonnante création de ce concept, que Deleuze mène depuis ses premières monographies jusqu'à Différence et Répétition dans un dialogue fécond avec l'histoire de la philosophie. Par quelles opérations de distorsion et de collage, Deleuze compose-t-il l'empirisme de Hume, la théorie du signe comme force de Nietzsche, le virtuel et les multiplicités de Bergson, les modes de Spinoza, les (...) individualisations impersonnelles de Simondon pour renouveler la théorie kantienne du transcendantal? C'est tout l'objet de cette enquête, qui permet d'entrer dans le laboratoire du penseur, pour saisir la philosophie se faisant, mais qui permet également d'expliquer l'insistance du transcendantal dans toute son oeuvre"--P. [4] of cover. (shrink)

Institutional economics and discourse theory stand unconnected next to each other, in spite of the fact that they both ask for the legitimacy of institutions (normative) and the functioning and effectiveness of institutions (positive). Both use as theoretical constructions rational individuals and the concept of consensus for legitimacy. Whereas discourse theory emphasizes the conditions of a legitimate consensus and could thus enable institutional economics to escape the infinite regress of judging a consensus legitimate, institutional economics has a tested social science (...) paradigm (rational choice) of explaining and predicting the functioning of institutions. The article outlines a theoretical synthesis of the two theories by finding points in common and possibilities of fruitful combinations concerning the problem of legitimacy, institutional design and effectiveness of legal norms. (shrink)

Cherche à mettre en évidence les principes théoriques qui peuvent être au fondement de toute recherche ou réflexion en sociologie de la musique.