In this paper, we explore how the prospect of artificial placenta technology (nearing clinical trials in human subjects) should encourage further consideration of the loss experienced by individuals when their pregnancy ends unexpectedly. Discussions of pregnancy loss are intertwined with procreative loss, whereby the gestated entity has died when the pregnancy ends. However, we demonstrate how pregnancy loss can and does exist separate to procreative loss in circumstances where the gestated entity survives the premature ending of the pregnancy. In outlining (...) the value that can be attached to pregnancy beyond fetal-centric narratives, we illustrate how pregnancy loss, separate to procreative loss, can be experienced. This loss has already been recognised among parents who have experienced an unexpected early ending of their pregnancy, resulting in their child being cared for in neonatal intensive care unit. Artificial placentas, however, may exacerbate these feelings and make pregnancy loss (without procreative loss) more visible. We argue that pregnancy is an embodied state in which gestation is facilitated by the body but gestation itself should be recognised as a process—and one that could be separable from pregnancy. In demarcating the two, we explore the different ways in which pregnancy loss can be understood. Our objective in this paper goes beyond contributing to our philosophical understanding of pregnancy towards practical-orientated conclusions regarding the care pathways surrounding the artificial placenta. We make recommendations including the need for counselling and careful consideration of the language used when an artificial placenta is used. (shrink)

Despite wide recognition of the importance of treating patients with respect and dignity, little is known about what constitutes treatment in this regard. The intensive care unit (ICU) is a unique setting that can pose specific threats to treatment with respect and dignity owing to the critical state of patients, stress and anxiety amongst patients and their family members, and the highly technical nature of the environment. In attempt to understand various stakeholders’ perspectives of treatment with respect and dignity, patients (...) and family members were interviewed, a wide range of health care professionals participated in focus groups, and third party observers took field notes of interactions in the ICU. This paper compares and contrasts the data that were generated using these different methods. Triangulating the data in this way contributes to a more complete and nuanced understanding of treatment with respect and dignity in the ICU. (shrink)

This study explores professional footballers’ perceptions of where banter crosses the conceptual line into bullying. The study’s focus is of importance, given the impact that abusive behaviors have been found to have on the welfare and safeguarding of English professional footballers. A phenomenological approach was adopted, which focused on the essence of the participants’ perceptions and experiences. Guided by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 male professional footballers from three Premier League and Championship football clubs. The (...) findings from this study revealed several key superordinate themes in relation to the dividing line between bullying and banter. These themes included “perception,” “intentionality,” “detecting the line,” and “having a bit of banter.” The findings demonstrate how perceptions of bullying and banter are nuanced by individual differences among the players and the culture of the professional football context. Specifically, it was found that the professional football context can legitimize forms of humor blurring the lines between bullying and banter, challenging the typically positive view of the concept of banter in this environment. From an applied perspective, these findings highlight the need for coaches, players, and football clubs more broadly to address cultural expectations around banter in their environment, while educating individuals around their own perceptions of bullying and banter. (shrink)

Against the background of the Second World War and post-war cultural change in Australia, this review article discusses the establishment of the profession of art history and art curatorial scholarship in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s. The key figures in this transformation were Franz Philipp and Ursula Hoff (European ‘savant’ refugees from Nazism and anti-Semitism), and the British scholar Joseph Burke (appointed as Herald Professor of Fine Arts at Melbourne University). These figures played pivotal roles in Sir Keith Murdoch's (...) ‘civilizing mission’ to reform Australian culture – a mission centred on Melbourne University and the National Gallery of Victoria under its new director, Daryl Lindsay. Within the context of the ‘culture wars’ dividing the Australian art world at this time, these reformers and pioneering scholars found themselves opposed by a radical art avant-garde under the leadership of the art patron John Reed. The work of key modernist Australian artists, above all Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale, became touchstones for radical and conservative positions in this conflict. (shrink)

O texto estrutura-se como um relato de experiência acerca das implicações da pesquisa autoetnográfica, associada ao conceito de exotopia proposto por Bakhtin (2010) em dissertação de mestrado profissional em Letras (PROFLETRAS). A pesquisa envolveu a atividade de revisão e reescrita em sala de aula, com alunos do 7º ano do Ensino Fundamental II, com o intuito de trabalhar a produção de textos como experiência subjetiva e dialógica com a língua(gem). A autoetnografia e a exotopia, interligadas pelo conceito dialógico na perspectiva (...) bakhtiniana, tornaram-se métodos e procedimentos fundamentais para o desenvolvimento das atividades didáticas em que os papeis de professora e pesquisadora fundiam-se na busca da resolução de problemas junto aos alunos participantes dessa experiência. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Kant's treatment of happiness in ethics.

Sex selection technologies have become increasingly prevalent and accessible. We can find them advertised widely across the Internet and discussed in the popular media—an entry for “sex selection services” on Google generated 859,000 sites in April 2004. The available services fall into three main types: preconception sperm sorting followed either by intrauterine insemination of selected sperm or by in vitro fertilization ; preimplantation genetic diagnosis, by which embryos created by IVF are tested and only those of the desired sex are (...) transferred to the woman's uterus; and prenatal testing of fetuses through ultrasound or chromosomal analysis, followed by selective abortion of fetuses detected to be of the undesired sex. (shrink)

Alcibiades is one of the most explicitly sexualized figures in fifth-century Athens, a "lover of the people" whom the demos "love and hate and long to possess" (Ar. Frogs 1425). But his eros fits ill with the normative sexuality of the democratic citizen as we usually imagine it. Simultaneously lover and beloved, effeminate and womanizer, Alcibiades is essentially paranomos, lawless or perverse. This paper explores the relation between Alcibiades' paranomia and the norms of Athenian sexuality, and argues that his eros (...) reveals an intrinsic instability within the sexual economy of the democracy: the desire he embodied blurred the categories that defined Athenian masculinity; the desire he inspired rendered the demos passive and "soft." This same instability can be seen in Thucydides' juxtaposition of the mutilation of the Herms and the legend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. These two episodes (obscurely linked by Thucydides) together tell of an idealized citizen body under threat. The tyrannicide story figures the democratic citizen as an elite lover, whose sexual dominance is vital to his political autonomy. The Herms, with their prominent phalloi, symbolized this citizen-lover, and thus their mutilation was an assault on the masculinity, as well as political power, of the demos. The tyrannicide legend seems to promise a defense against this threat of civic castration; but instead of shoring up the sexually-dominant citizen, Thucydides' version of the legend merely reveals his frailty and fictionality: even in Athens' heroic past there is no inviolable democratic eros to cure the impotence of mutilation and tyranny. Reading these two episodes against the backdrop of Alcibiades' paranomia (as described by Plutarch and Plato), this paper examines the nature of democratic masculinity, the (eroticized) relation between demagogue and demos, and the place of perverse desire within the protocols of sex. (shrink)

Building on Deleuze’s theories of the becoming of bodies, and notions of the geographic maturity of the disabled body we formulate an emplaced model of disability wherein bodies, social expectations and built form intersect in embodied experiences in specific environments to increase or decrease the capacity of disabled children to act in those environments. We join a growing effort to generate a more comprehensive model of disability, which moves beyond a binary between the individual and the social. Drawing on in-depth (...) case studies conducted with 13 physically disabled children, we consider the intersections between their primary environments (homes, schools and neighbourhoods) and the multiple subjectivities they embody. Ultimately we make a case about the importance of responsive, situated models of subjectivity for the development of adaptations, and that physical and social adaptations must respond to these children’s complex and varied needs and desires. (shrink)

El presente estudio analiza la empatía como habilidad cognitivo-emocional-afectiva del médico que permite vivenciar la situación emocional del paciente y transformar el encuentro clínico en un acto solidario y responsable. Señala la importancia de cuidar abnegadamente al otro atendiendo su vulnerabilidad y dependencia, y subraya el valor de custodiar la vida humana hasta su cumplimiento natural, haciéndose cargo del otro, por medio del acompañamiento y de propiciar la renovación del sentido de la existencia, cuando esta está marcada por el sufrimiento (...) y la enfermedad. Se indica que la empatía interviene en la toma de decisiones de la práctica clínica. El análisis detallado de los niveles de empatía, su manifestación en la personalidad de los entrevistados y cómo esta interviene en la toma de decisiones comprueban los beneficios de un trabajo enfocado en defender la intangibilidad de la vida humana y la dignidad de la persona. (shrink)

abstract In Political Liberalism and later work John Rawls has recast his theory of justice as fairness in political terms. In order to illustrate the advantages of a liberal political approach to justice over liberal non‐political ones, Rawls discusses what kind of education might be required for future citizens of pluralistic and democratic societies. He advocates a rather minimal conception of civic education that he claims to derive from political liberalism. One group of authors has sided with Rawls’ political perspective (...) and educational proposal, holding that a political approach and educational requirements that are not too demanding would have the advantage of being acceptable to a wide range of citizens with different religious, moral and philosophical perspectives. A second group of authors have criticized Rawls’ educational recommendations, holding that the production of a just society composed of reasonable citizens requires a more demanding civic education and, hence, that the political approach is not viable. The present paper argues that both groups are only partially right, and that there is a third way to understand civic education in Rawlsian terms, a way that is political but not minimal. (shrink)

... significs and the signific movement in the Netherlands which derived from it from the standpoint of the history of science stems from my esteemed ...

In the age of information overload, the primary concern for many knowledge areas becomes the organisation and retrieval of data. Artists have a unique opportunity, at this historical juncture, to play a role in the definition and design of systems of access and retrieval, and at the very least comment on the existing practices. In this article I show how some personalities have foreshadowed and indeed influenced the current practices and huge efforts in digitising our collective knowledge. This article is (...) an effort to broadly contextualise the current atmosphere and environment that ‘information architects’ are confronted with. (shrink)

Kant commentators have recently begun to pay attention to Kant’s account of friendship. They have asked questions, such as: Is his description of friendship consistent and robust and does it provide an account of friendship that satisfies common intuitions and expectations of friendship? Their answers to these questions have often been negative. At the same time, many of these critics share a common understanding of two basic aspects of Kant’s account of friendship. Kant sees friendship as both a duty and (...) an ideal state. One critic, Patricia Flynn, considers the implications of this dual claim. She argues that the view that friendship is both duty and idea gives rise to a tension in the concept of friendship. This tension makes the duty of friendship different from all other Kantian moral duties and leaves us with a duty that we cannot achieve. My aim is to revisit Flynn’s argument and by reassessing Kant’s claims to show that there is indeed complexity in Kant’s understanding of friendship, but there is no conceptual problem that makes friendship a duty unlike all other duties or makes it an impossible duty. (shrink)

The Homeobox (Hox) genes essentially define body regions in all animals including humans – responsible for determining two arms, two legs, one nose and so on. This gene is shared by all living beings – from the snail to the elephant to humans – and it can now be manipulated into transforming certain parts of the body into others. We have observed such transformations, such as that of an amputated antenna into a limb, as far back as 1901, termed neomorphosis (...) (Morgan 1901), and it has only recently re-emerged as an area of scientific study. Spontaneous transformations and induced regenerations are fascinating research topics that are fast becoming a reality; some scientists are postulating that it may be possible that the hox gene could be central to limb regeneration in the future. This article will present the Hox Zodiac project, which attempts to introduce this subject and push the ideas further into speculation of mutation (i.e. humans and animals) into creatures that may resemble the mythical beings we know as fiction. The starting point of this wheel of life is the Chinese zodiac, consisting of twelve animals that are associated with humans. In the process of development, it became interesting to note that half of the animals on the wheel are those used in the lab – rat, pig, monkey, dog, sheep and rabbit. The ox, tiger, horse, snake and rooster are considered mythical and the dragon could easily fall into the category of a genetically modified creature that is to re-emerge in the future. Since medical and scientific testing on humans is strictly forbidden, scientists have virtually shifted to animals for all such studies. Thus, everything that is used on our bodies and minds is directly related to the animal kingdom. The pig heart and rat mind are symbols for the paradox of science that uses animals in ways that are at once disconnected while subconsciously connecting us more than ever by using research results in medical and food products we consume. Although the controversy of using animals in labs is widely known and often violently opposed, the artist in the lab questions how this research impacts our collective consciousness, especially with the growing trend of brain-computer interfaces and particularly synthetic telepathy. This relationship of the human to the metaphorical meaning of the animal kingdom brought to mind Jung’s research on metaphors, symbolism and archetypes, which became central to the Hox Zodiac. (shrink)

Within recent feminist philosophy, controversy has developed over the desirability, and indeed, the possibility of defining the central terms of its analysis-"woman," "femininity," etc. The controversy results largely from the undertheorization of the notion of definition; feminists have uncritically adopted an Aristotelian treatment of definition as entailing metaphysical, rather than merely linguistic, commitments. A "discursive" approach to definition, by contrast, allows us to define our terms, while avoiding the dangers of essentialism and universalism.

The only hope of survival for children with a number of life-threatening illnesses is a successful bone marrow transplant (BMT). Unlike the treatment source for most therapies, the raw material for transplant therapy comes from a human being. Although, many BMTs are autologous, utilizing the patient's own bone marrow, a large percentage of childhood BMTs rely on bone marrow from children or adolescents who are biological siblings to the sick child. Medical and legal systems are confronted with a dilemma when (...) healthy children are needed to undergo minimally risky, yet somewhat painful, procedures for the benefit of their critically ill siblings. This article reviews legal issues involved in sibling bone marrow donation and psychological research that is relevant to those issues. The article concludes with proposed directions for future psycholegal research and a discussion of ethical issues that are not amenable to empirical investigation. (shrink)

The highly homologous Rac1 and Rac2 GTPases are co‐expressed in cells of haematopoietic origin and are likely to show some functional redundancy. While disruption of the Rac2 gene in mice has provided insight into some of its functions, Rac1 null mice are embryonic lethal and only recently has conditional gene disruption been possible. Consequently, two articles1,2 have recently elucidated some overlapping and unique key roles of Rac1 and Rac2 in haematopoietic processes including specialized roles in innate and humoral immunity. BioEssays (...) 26:221–224, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)