The ArgumentThe remarkable progress in modern genetic technology enables the identification of genes causing devastating diseases and thereby the development of tools for prenatal diagnosis and carrier detection. To implement the results of genetic research in traditional societies, where genetic diseases are more prevalent due to inbreeding, necessitates a culturally appropriate approach that also promotes traditional and societal values important to the relevant community. This paper presents our experience with implementing the results of modern genetic research among the traditional community (...) of the Negev Bedouin of Israel. Although the benefit of using those results for the prevention of genetic diseases seems obvious, successful implementation relies on a carefully designed educational program aimed at changing culturally related attitudes and perceptions. Such a program should attend to the needs of the community and be sensitive to its traditional values. (shrink)

The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy is a collection of new essays on the philosophy and philosophers of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Written by a cast of international scholars, it covers the full range of ancient philosophy from the sixth century BC to the sixth century AD and beyond. There are dedicated discussions of the major areas of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle together with accounts of their predecessors and successors. The contributors also address various problems of (...) interpretation and method, highlighting the particular demands and interest of working with ancient philosophical texts. All original texts discussed are translated into English. (shrink)

Two of the most important political movements of the late twentieth century are those of environmentalism and feminism. In this book, Val Plumwood argues that feminist theory has an important opportunity to make a major contribution to the debates in political ecology and environmental philosophy. _Feminism and the Mastery of Nature_ explains the relation between ecofeminism, or ecological feminism, and other feminist theories including radical green theories such as deep ecology. Val Plumwood provides a philosophically informed account of the relation (...) of women and nature, and shows how relating male domination to the domination of nature is important and yet remains a dilemma for women. (shrink)

Ethics and ideals for political mobilization intended for all political parties in Tamil Nadu with spocial focus to Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, political party.

In this much-needed account of what has gone wrong in our thinking about the environment, Val Plumwood digs at the roots of environmental degradation. She argues that we need to see nature as an end itself, rather than an instrument to get what we want. Using a range of examples, Plumwood presents a radically new picture of how our culture must change to accommodate nature.

This paper investigates how specific notions of gender and ethnicity are integrated into diversity discourses presented on 241 top European company websites. Large European companies increasingly disclose equality and diversity policies in statements on websites. Such statements may be used to promote an ethical image of the company in terms of how well it manages diversity and guards against discrimination. In this paper, we argue that diversity statement discourses are important as they play a key part in socially constructing how (...) diversity should be regarded in the company by minority and majority groups, as well as indicating corporate values to external stakeholders. Sometimes, the notions of gender or ethnic diversity are positioned as a liability in need of protection, whilst in others, as a source of competitive advantage. We find evidence of use of discursive tools such as problematisation, rationalisation, fixation, reframing and naturalisation of the notions of gender and ethnic diversity, reinforced by use of symbols, such as statistics, photographs, membership badges and awards. Few statements directly associate gender and ethnic diversity with enhanced corporate performance. We found that diversity statements sometimes appear to reinforce existing business stereotypes of women and people from ethnic minorities, and in a few discourses, create new ones, particularly evident in photographs illustrating the diversity web pages. (shrink)

This paper investigates how specific notions of gender and ethnicity are integrated into diversity discourses presented on 241 top European company websites. Large European companies increasingly disclose equality and diversity policies in statements on websites. Such statements may be used to promote an ethical image of the company in terms of how well it manages diversity and guards against discrimination. In this paper, we argue that diversity statement discourses are important as they play a key part in socially constructing how (...) diversity should be regarded in the company by minority and majority groups, as well as indicating corporate values to external stakeholders (investors, government, community, press etc.). Sometimes, the notions of gender or ethnic diversity are positioned as a liability in need of protection, whilst in others, as a source of competitive advantage. We find evidence of use of discursive tools such as problematisation, rationalisation, fixation, reframing and naturalisation of the notions of gender and ethnic diversity, reinforced by use of symbols, such as statistics, photographs, membership badges and awards. Few statements directly associate gender and ethnic diversity with enhanced corporate performance. We found that diversity statements sometimes appear to reinforce existing business stereotypes of women and people from ethnic minorities, and in a few discourses, create new ones, particularly evident in photographs illustrating the diversity web pages. (shrink)

Rationalism is the key to the connected oppressions of women and nature in the West. Deep ecology has failed to provide an adequate historical perspective or an adequate challenge to human/nature dualism. A relational account of self enables us to reject an instrumental view of nature and develop an alternative based on respect without denying that nature is distinct from the self. This shift of focus links feminist, environmentalist, and certain forms of socialist critiques. The critique of anthropocentrism is not (...) sacrificed, as deep ecologists argue, but enriched. (shrink)

Ideal for undergraduate students in philosophy and science studies, Philosophy of Technology offers an engaging and comprehensive overview of a subject vital to our time. An up-to-date, accessible overview of the philosophy of technology, defining technology and its characteristics. Explores the issues that arise as technology becomes an integral part of our society. In addition to traditional topics in science and technology studies, the volume offers discussion of technocracy, the romantic rebellion against technology. Complements The Philosophy of Technology : The (...) Technological Condition: An Anthology, edited by Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek. (shrink)

Yule, Val A series of before-and-after pictures shows the cost to a city that is bombed. A recent example is the UNESCO-listed sites in the Syrian city of Aleppo - one example is given above. After bombing these sites were all rubble.

Power is everywhere. But what is it and how does it infuse personal and institutional relationships in higher education? Power, Knowledge and the Academy: The Institutional is Political takes a close-up and critical look at both the elusive and blatant workings and consequences of power in a range of everyday sites in universities. Chapters focus on specific locations in which power shapes personal and institutional knowledge including student-supervisor relationships, research teams, networking, the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK, and literature (...) reviews. (shrink)

Frisbee Sheffield argues that the Symposium has been unduly marginalized by philosophers. Although the topic, eros, and the setting at a symposium have seemed anomalous, she demonstrates that both are intimately related to Plato's preoccupation with the nature of the good life, with virtue, and how it is acquired and transmitted. For Plato, analyzing our desires is a way of reflecting on the kind of people we will turn out to be and on our chances of leading a worthwhile (...) and happy life. In its focus on the question why he considered desires to be amenable to this type of reflection, this book explores Plato's ethics of desire. (shrink)

Laws, codes, and rules are essential for any community, public or private, to operate in an orderly and productive fashion. Without laws and codes, anarchy and chaos abound and the purpose and role of the organization is lost. However, danger is significant, and damage serious and far-reaching when individuals or organizations become so focused on rules, laws, and specifications that basic principles are ignored. This paper discusses the purpose of laws, rules, and codes, to help understand basic principles. With such (...) an understanding an increase in the level of ethical and moral behavior can be obtained without imposing detailed rules. (shrink)

Se estudia la conveniencia de incluir el concepto de histéresis en las disciplinas humanistas, así como la necesidad de incorporar el análisis de los fenómenos donde aquél participa. La histéresis se produce en los más diversos campos de la acción y el pensamiento humanos, y su estudio contribuiría a completar y perfeccionar la visión que tenemos de los mismos. Al realizar la inclusión que aquí se propone, se operan varios cambios de orden epistemológico, operativo y conceptual. En las disciplinas humanistas, (...) los conceptos vienen asumiendo por tradición el papel de herramientas analíticas en bastante mayor medida que el de contenidos sobre los que efectuar el análisis. La histéresis manifiesta su alcance como hecho a analizar y también como herramienta de análisis, pero en el caso presente hemos tenido en cuenta más aspectos del segundo enfoque que del primero. De aquí que nos hayamos centrado en ubicar su campo epistemológico. (shrink)

Frisbee Sheffield argues that the Symposium has been unduly marginalized by philosophers. Although the topic - eros - and the setting at a symposium have seemed anomalous, she demonstrates that both are intimately related to Plato's preoccupation with the nature of the good life, with virtue, and how it is acquired and transmitted.

Critical reflection helps professionals to learn directly from their practice experience, so that they can improve their own work in an ongoing and flexible way - something essential in today's complex and changing organisations. It allows change to be managed in a way which enables individuals to preserve a sense of what is fundamentally important to them as professionals. It is particularly important as it can also help make sense of some fundamental issues, and so also has implications for how (...) we live our lives. However, more systematic research on critical reflection is needed to help us understand what works best for professionals in different settings. This timely work explores how critical reflection is researched, evaluated and used as a research method itself, with the aim of improving how it is taught and practised in a rigorous and transferable way. Developing a more comprehensive and multi-disciplinary view of the current state of critical reflection and the research directions which need to be taken, the book is divided into four parts. It: - Provides an overview of different perspectives on critical reflection and stimulates dialogue between them - Establishes some common platforms from which to develop further research directions - Identifies the major issues in evaluating critical reflection teaching, and main methods for doing so - Contributes to social science methodological innovations by exploring how methods based on critical reflection can be used for researching professional practice - Contains contributions from academics who are internationally known and highly experienced in different aspects of critical reflection. Researching Critical Reflectionis an important reference for all students, practitioners, and researchers - including in the areas of education, management, health and social work - who engage with critical reflection to develop their practice. (shrink)

People with early-to-mid stage dementia frequently attend groups that provide opportunities for socialising and engaging in group activities, such as quizzes. This article uses conversation analysis to investigate the interactional strategies that the staff use to initiate and keep these quizzes ‘on track’, and what they orient to as impediments and facilitators of quiz progression. Specifically, we outline how staff deal with incorrect or ‘non-answers’, and what happens when players have their own goals or ‘projects’ that do not align with (...) staff members’ orientations to the overarching activity completion. We reflect on the tensions that arise between doing interactional work to progress through the quiz, and how that goal can conflict with attending to the needs or wishes expressed by the person living with dementia, potentially resulting in threats to the ‘face’ of the quiz players. Data are taken from a corpus of 10 quizzes recorded in 4 different group settings in England. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a context where interdisciplinarity intersects with interprofessionality: the work of children's services professionals who address the needs of children identified as vulnerable. It draws on evidence and perspectives from two disciplines — educational studies and health care — to consider the issues and challenges posed by learning and/or working across disciplinary boundaries and why these have proved so obdurate.

In 2002, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) published the report of an independent panel of experts into maintaining standards at Advanced Level (A-Level). One of its recommendations was for: 'limited experimental double marking of scripts in subjects such as English to determine whether the strategy would significantly reduce errors of measurement' (p. 24). This recommendation provided the impetus for this paper which reviews the all but forgotten literature on double marking and considers its relevance now.

Dictionary of Jainism and Jaina philosophy.

Fluctuations in positive and negative caregiving experiences remain only partially explained as the significant variability over time of potential predictive factors themselves is understudied. The current study aims to gain considerable insight into caregiving experiences and perceptions over time by using photovoice methodology to support semi-structured interviews. A case study, longitudinal design is taken with three female caregivers who provide detailed insight into their caregivers' experiences over a 12 month period. The interview transcripts were analyzed using IPA- Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. (...) This innovative combination of methods resulted in the emergence of three related themes which included consuming the role, feeling consumed by the role, and letting go of the role. The idiographic approach taken allowed both within case differences to be examined over time, and also between carer differences to be highlighted. Implications of illness type and its characteristics, and of attachment and relationship quality with the care recipient were seen in terms of how and when the caregivers moved between the themes identified. The use of others' support or respite care is examined vis-a vis caregiver's own beliefs, emotions, relationship attachment and motivations to care. Caregivers self-efficacy beliefs also shifted over time and were influential in caregiver experience as the care recipient condition or needs changed. No previous studies have found that negative caregiving consequences are, in part, under volitional control and yet our data on the underlying reasons for consuming caregiving or allowing themselves to consume, would suggest this may in part be true. This is important because it suggests that interventions to support caregivers should address relational and motivational factors more fully. (shrink)

Women, Humanity and Nature Val Plum wood There is now a growing awareness that the Western philosophical tradition which has identified, on the one hand, maleness with the sphere of rationality, and on the other hand, femaleness with the sphere...

The critique of anthrocentrism has been one of the major tasks of ecophilosophy, whose characteristic general thesis has been that our frameworks of morality and rationality must be challenged to include consideration of nonhumans. But the core of anthrocentrism is embattled and its relationship to practical environmental activism is problematic. I shall argue here that although the criticisms that have been made of the core concept have some justice, the primary problem is not the framework challenge or the core concept (...) itself, but rather certain problematic understandings of it which have developed in environmental philosophy. In the case of the intrinsic/instrumental distinction, much of the criticism turns on unrealistic expectations about what the distinction means and what it can do; in the case of anthropocentrism, a perverse reading which I will call cosmic anthrocentrism has invited many of the criticisms which have been widely seen as fatal to the concept. Using concepts and models originating in feminist theory and other liberation critiques, I outline an alternative, feminist rereading of anthrocentrism. I argue that this model is theoretically illuminating and capable of meeting major objections that the perverse readings have invited. Critics of the core distinctions have almost universally identified the two core concepts and issues of anthrocentrism and instrumental/intrinsic value. The analysis I present will show how these concepts and issues are connected, but also why there is more to anthrocentrism than the failure to recognise the intrinsic value of nature, and why anthrocentrism rather that intrinsic value should be the major conceptual focus of environmental critique. It will also show why the framework challenge is of practical importance to the green movement and why anthrocentrism is a serious problem in contemporary life. (shrink)

In this posthumously published paper Val Plumwood reflects on two personal encounters with death, being seized as prey by a crocodile and burying her son in a country cemetery with a flourishing botanic community. She challenges the exceptionalism which sets the human self apart from nature and which is reflected in the choice between two conceptions of death, one of continuity in the realm of spirit, the other a reductive materialist conception in which death marks the end of the story (...) of the self. Both perspectives structure out the basis of animal existence – that we are all food, and through death nourish others. She commends an animistic materialist approach, where life is seen as in circulation and where mortuary practices might affirm death as an opportunity of life for others in the ecological community. (shrink)

Patrick Heelan, with background in quantum theory and in hermeneutic phenomenology, investigated not only the hermeneutical philosophy of science but also the parallels between quantum mechanics and human experience in general and the logic of changes of worldview. Heelan’s closeness to Aristotle and Lonergan, often neglected, is discussed, and issues concerning Heelan’s treatment of the social context of science are raised.

: The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report issued in April 2005 shows how severely our civilisation is degrading and overstressing the natural systems that support human life and all other lives on earth. An important critical challenge, especially for the eco-humanities, is to help us understand the conceptual frameworks and systems that disappear the crucial support provided by natural systems and prevent us from seeing nature as a field of agency. This paper considers the currently popular concept of a cultural landscape (...) as an example of a concept that downplays natural agency, and discusses the epistemology of nature scepticism and nature cynicism that often accompanies its vogue in the humanities. Can some philosophical disentangling of senses of nature (often considered the most complex term in the language) allow sceptics their main points without placing them on such a strong collision course with the requirements of commonsense and survival? (shrink)

ABSTRACT The major approaches to belief revision and non monotonic reasoning proposed in the literature differ along a number of dimensions, including whether they are “syntax- based” or “semantic-based”, “foundational” or “coherentist”, “consistence-restoring” or “inconsistency-tolerant”. Our contribution towards clarifying the connections between these various approaches is threefold: •We show that the two main approaches to belief revision, the foundations and coherence theories, are mathematically equivalent, thus answering a question left open in [Gar90, Doy92], The distinction between syntax-based approaches to revision (...) and approaches based on (semantic) preferential structures falls along similar lines, and their expressive equivalence is a consequence of this result. •We formally clarify the connection between belief revision and non monotonic reasoning, in a particularly simple way which also throws light on the connection between consistence- restoring and reasoning-from-inconsistency approaches [BDP95]. •As a direct application of the above, we show that Poole's (syntax-based) system of default reasoning and Shoham's preferential semantic for non monotonic reasoning are also expressively equivalent, in that they can represent the same set of non monotonic consequence relations. (shrink)

Little attention has been paid to the role which impression management (IM) of genuine and substantial talents and commitment plays in the careers of female and male managers seeking promotion. IM studies have largely investigated the supervisor/subordinate relationship, often with samples of business students in laboratory settings. In the Cranfield Centre for Developing Women Business Leaders, we have focused on the use of IM by practising managers. In this paper, we examine previous literature for indications that gender may be important (...) in explaining differences in IM behaviours. We then report findings from a survey and a qualitative study, showing that gender, especially combined with age and job level, is a differentiating factor in managers' inclinations to use particular IM behaviours. Many women (and some men too) seem uncomfortable with using IM. Women do not always want to play "the organizational game" by the male-constructed unwritten rules, but prefer to trust good management and systems fairness for just rewards. Younger and junior level women managers often recognize that IM may be a useful tool but reject its use for themselves. Women seem to prefer to rely on extra high performance and commitment for visibility to their seniors rather than the networking, ingratiation and self-promotion strategies used more by males. An important consequence is that as ambitious young males use job-focused IM in addition to self and manager-focused strategies, this is likely to leave young women at a considerable disadvantage for promotion, if the strategies are successful. (shrink)