This article examines the contribution that poetry written over the last fifty years might make to the established and burgeoning field of Medical Humanities. It takes poems by women about cancer and depression as a case study of how they can offer insight into the impact of these conditions on the sufferer. Collectively, the poems document and effect shifts in knowledge about, and the associated stigmas concerning, illnesses that carry secrecy and shame, specifically cancer and depression. Additionally, drawing on (...) class='Hi'>Virginia Woolf’s remarkable essay “On Being Ill”, we see how the non-verbal features of poems, particularly metaphors and symbols, mark the space of what a patient cannot fully articulate. Accordingly, the poems discussed illuminate how literature can express human interiority but at the same time remind the reader – or health professional – that interiority can never be fully presented. Thus, poetry both contributes to and also checks the ways in which literature is appropriated by the biomedical sciences. The poets included are Eavan Boland, Julia Darling, U.A. Fanthorpe, Jackie Kay, Gwyneth Lewis, Carol Satyamurti and Jo Shapcott. Some poems specify a female subjectivity, some express agency as autonomous individuals, while others presume to speak of common human experience. (shrink)

Attention has a long history in philosophy, despite its near absence in the twentieth century. This chapter provides an overview of philosophical research on attention. It begins by explaining the concept of "selection from limitation," contrasting it with the more recent "selection for action." It reviews historical texts that discuss attention, focusing on those in the Western canon whose understanding of "attention" aligns with contemporary usage. It then describes the differential treatment of attention in phenomenology and behaviorism in the last (...) century. Finally, it discusses contemporary research by topic: attention, perception, and knowledge; attention and consciousness; attention and action; and attention and the self. It includes work by Allport,Aristotle, Astell, Augustine, Bergson, Berkeley, Block, Bradley, Buddhaghosa, Campbell, Cherry, De Brigard, Dehaene and Naccache, Descartes, Dickie, Du Bois, Ganeri, Hegel, Heidegger, James, Kant, Koch and Tsuchiya, LaBerge, Locke, Mack and Rock, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Mole, Montemayor and Haladjian, Neumann, Pashler, Posner, Prinz, Reid, Rensink, Reynolds and Heeger, Treisman, Watzl, Wittgenstein, Wollstonecraft, and Wu. (shrink)

This article defends ‘relational theorizing’ in bioethics and public health ethics and describes its importance. It then offers an interpretation of solidarity and care understood as normatively patterned and psychologically and socially structured modes of relationality; in a word, solidarity and care understood as ‘practices.’ Solidarity is characterized as affirming the moral standing of others and their membership in a community of equal dignity and respect. Care is characterized as paying attention to the moral being of others and their needs, (...) suffering, and vulnerability. The wager of relational theorizing in health care and public health is that substantive ethical visions of solidarity and care will provide support for more just and egalitarian health care and public health policies. (shrink)

Assuming that the purpose of research ethics review is to support the ethical conduct and dissemination of good quality research, a question can be raised concerning whether ethics review of research really improves the practice of researchers. Specifically, we might distinguish the activities that go on as part of the review process from those activities that constitute the data collection phase of the research, and ask under what conditions the former have a positive impact on the latter. Two different models (...) of ethics review can be distinguished, term them ‘compliance’ and ‘reflexivity’-based reviews. Compliance-based models of review require researchers to show how they are complying with a given set of rules or protocols for research. Reflexivity-based models require researchers to articulate the ethical issues involved in their research and to explain and justify the way in which they plan to manage them. It is suggested here that there is reason to think that reflexivity-based models of ethics review are more likely to have a positive effect on the practice of social science research than compliance-based reviews. (shrink)

Conducting research with vulnerable populations involves careful attention to the interests of individuals. Although it is generally understood that informed consent is a necessary prerequisite to research participation, it is less clear how to proceed when potential research participants lack the capacity to provide this informed consent. The rationale for assessing the assent or dissent of vulnerable individuals and obtaining informed consent by authorized representatives is discussed. Practical guidelines for recruitment of and data collection from people in the middle or (...) late stage of dementia are proposed. These guidelines were used by research assistants in a minimal risk study. (shrink)

In 2018 Academic Placement Data and Analysis ran a survey of doctoral students and recent graduates on the topics of diversity and inclusivity in collaboration with the Graduate Student Council and Data Task Force of the American Philosophical Association. We submitted a preliminary report in Fall 2018 that describes the origins and procedure of the survey [1]. This is our final report on the survey. We first discuss the demographic profile of our survey participants and compare it to the United (...) States general population, its doctoral students, and APA membership, finding several areas of underrepresentation (i.e. gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic, and veteran status). We then discuss the results of questions regarding diversity and inclusivity. We find, for instance, that participant comfort in philosophy depends on gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, and language status and that participants most often mentioned the theme of diversity when asked how philosophy could be more inclusive. Finally, we discuss the results of questions related to graduate program and placement. We find, for example, that underrepresented graduates are both less likely to recommend their graduate program to others and less likely to prefer an academic job. We close by making some recommendations for the APA and for the discipline based on our findings. (shrink)

Virginia Held's Feminist Morality defends the idea that it is possible to transform the "public" sphere by remaking it on the model of existing "private" relationships such as families. This paper challenges Held's optimism. It is argued that feminist moral inquiry can aid in transforming the public sphere only by showing just how much the allegedly "private" realms of families and personal relationships are shaped-and often misshapen-by public demands and concerns.

Across the world, an authoritarian and exclusionary form of populism is gaining political traction. Historically, some populist movements have been democratic and based on a sense of inclusive justice and the common good. But the populism on the rise at present speaks and acts otherwise. It is challenging constitutional democracies. The polarization seen in authoritarian populism goes beyond the familiar left-right political spectrum and generates disturbing forms of extremism, including the so-called alternative right in the United States and similar ethnic (...) and nationalistic political movements in other countries. The field of bioethics will be profoundly affected if authoritarian populism displaces constitutional democracy. But the field has a significant contribution to make to rebuilding the communal and civic foundations upon which constitutional democracy rests. (shrink)

Doctoral graduates in philosophy are an excellent source of information about the discipline: they are at the cutting edge of research trends, have an inside view of researchfocused departments, and their employment prospects provide early insights on the future health of the discipline. We report on the results of a survey sent to recent PhD graduates and current students, as well as data gathering efforts by Academic Placement Data and Analysis that have taken place over the past ten years. In (...) this report we especially focus on demographic representation, program ratings, academic job placement, and non-academic careers. (shrink)

Public health involves the use of power to change institutions and redistribute resources and deliberately to shape individual thought and behavior. This requires normative legitimation and demands ethical critique. This article explores concepts that are vital to public health ethics, but have been relatively neglected. These are membership, solidarity and the concept of place. The article argues that the practice of public health should recognize the equal rights of membership in communities of health justice. Public health should also rely on (...) a sense of obligation and mutual aid in a world of shared vulnerability and reciprocal recognition. Finally, public health achieves its goals not merely—and perhaps not most fundamentally—through information and altering the logical ratiocination of individuals or groups, but rather through the reformation of sense and sensibility. (shrink)

It is argued that the preservation of truth by an inference relation is of little interest when premiss sets are contradictory. The notion of a level of coherence is introduced and the utility of modal logics in the semantic representation of sets of higher coherence levels is noted. It is shown that this representative role cannot be transferred to first order logic via frame theory since the modal formulae expressing coherence level restrictions are not first order definable. Finally, an inference (...) relation, calledyielding, is introduced which is intermediate between the coherence preservingforcing relation introduced elsewhere by the authors and the coherence destroying, inference relation of classical logic. (shrink)

Wayne Wu argues that attention is necessary for action: since action requires a solution to the ‘Many–Many Problem’, and since only attention can solve the Many–Many Problem, attention is necessary for action. We question the first of these two steps and argue that it is based on an oversimplified distinction between actions and reflexes. We argue for a more complex typology of behaviours where one important category is action that does not require a solution to the Many–Many Problem, and so (...) does not require attention. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss logic from a naturalist point of view, characterizing it as those shared patterns of thought which are socially selected from among the various patterns of thought to which we are naturally inclined. Drawing on Evans-Pritchard's anthropology. I discuss a particular example of Zande thought. I argue that Evans-Pritchard's and Timm Triplett's analyses of this example make the mistake of applying Western logic to Zande beliefs and thus find a contradiction. I argue that from the naturalistic (...) point of view. Zande logic is different from Western logic and that there is no contradiction in Zande thought. (shrink)

This paper explores whether consciousness can exist without attention. This is a hot topic in philosophy of mind and cognitive science due to the popularity of theories that hold attention to be necessary for consciousness. The discovery of a form of consciousness that exists without the influence of attention would require a change in the way that many global workspace theorists, for example, understand the role and function of consciousness. Against this understanding, at least three forms of consciousness have been (...) argued to exist without attention: perceptual gist, imagistic consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness. After first arguing that the evidence is inconclusive on the question of whether these forms of consciousness exist without attention, I here present a fourth form of consciousness that is likely to be more successful: conscious entrainment. I argue that conscious entrainment is a form of consciousness associated with skilled behavior in which attention is sometimes absent. (shrink)

Key sections of Walter Benjamin's montage-text Berlin Childhood around 1900 figure the relationship between human experience and modern media, with the sections that frame the text, ‘Loggias’ and ‘The Moon’, structured around metaphors of photography. Drawing on the work of Siegfried Kracauer, and especially his seminal essay ‘Photography’, Benjamin develops, in the course of his book, a theory of photography's relationship to experience that runs counter to the better-known theories developed in such essays as ‘Little History of Photography’ and ‘The (...) Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, theories that are part of the broad currents of technological utopianism and, as such, emphasize photography's transformative potentials. In the Berlin Childhood, Benjamin instead emphasizes photography's role in the mortification and annihilation of meaningful human experience. Photography emerges here as the mausoleum of youth and hope. (shrink)

The main questions in philosophical research on attention concern its nature and impact. Regarding its nature, one might ask what sort of thing attention is; regarding its impact, one might ask what sort of thing attention does. While these questions have been asked by philosophers for thousands of years, they have had a resurgence in recent years due to advancements in the cognitive and neural sciences. This chapter will cover some historical context as prelude to a discussion of the contemporary (...) debates, ending with issues that are as of yet still on the horizon. Topics covered include the divide between voluntary/involuntary, endogenous/exogenous, and top-down/bottom-up attention; the Posner cueing task; Treisman and the binding problem; Mack and Rock on inattentional blindness; Grassia, Campbell, and Dickie on attention, perception, and knowledge; the debate between Block, Dehaene, and others on consciousness and attention; Wu on attention and action; and future directions for attention research in predictive processing models, neuroethics, technology, and addiction. (shrink)

Attention is essential to the life of the mind, a central topic in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. Traditional debates in philosophy stand to benefit from greater understanding of the phenomenon, whether on the nature of the self, the foundation of knowledge, the natural basis of consciousness, or the origins of action and responsibility. This book is at the crossroads of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, offering a new theoretical stance on the concept of attention and how it intersects (...) with other functions of the mind, such as perception, consciousness, and action. It presents attention as directed by a subject, essential for perception, but not consciousness or action. By taking seriously the existence of a subject it stands against current trends in philosophy and cognitive science. This book offers an account of the subject and its role in attention that will both help motivate a subject-centered account and avoid some of the common criticisms regarding its existence. It engages with work by many philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, including Block, Campbell, Dickie, Husserl, James, Koch, Mack and Rock, Merleau-Ponty, Treisman, and Wu. (shrink)

The concept of consensus is often appealed to in discussions of biomedical ethics and applied ethics, and it plays an important role in many influential ethical theories. Consensus is an especially influential notion among theorists who reject ethical realism and who frame ethics as a practice of discourse rather than a body of objective knowledge. It is also a practically important notion when moral decision making is subject to bureaucratic organization and oversight, as is increasingly becoming the case in medicine. (...) Two models of consensus are examined and criticized: pluralistic consensus and overlapping consensus. As an alternative to these models, the paper argues that consensus refers to the dialogic aspects of a broader normative conception of democratic moral agency. When the preconditions for that dialogic democratic practice are met, consensus has a justificatory role in ethics; when they are not, consensus, as distinct from mere agreement, does not emerge and can have no moral authority. Keywords: applied ethics, bioethics, consensus, contract theory, democracy, discourse ethics, liberalism CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Many working in bioethics today are engaging in forms of normative interpretation concerning the meaningful contexts of relational agency and institutional structures of power. Using the framework of relational bioethics, this article focuses on two significant social practices that are significant for health policy and public health: the practices of solidarity and the practices of care. The main argument is that the affirming recognition of, and caring attention paid to, persons as moral subjects can politically motivate a society in three (...) respects. The recognition of solidarity and the attention of care can prompt progressive change toward a democratic willingness: (a) to provide for equal respect for rights and dignity; (b) to provide the social resources and services needed for just health and well‐being; and (c) to focus its creativity and wealth on the actualization of potential flourishing of each and all. Solidarity is discussed as a morally developmental stance that moves from standing up for another, standing up with another, and standing up as another. Care is discussed as a morally developmental stance that moves from the attentive rehabilitation of another, attentive companionship with and for another, and attentive commitment to another. (shrink)

After an introduction to the major issues confronting intellectuals, this book explores the various aspects of the intellectual's role including: * philosophers and academics who have tried to define the function of the intellectual * how intellectuals have assumed the status of the conscience of the nation and the voice of the oppressed * the interaction of intellectuals with Marxism * the place of the intellectual in American society Covering regions as diverse as Israel, Algeria, Britain, Ireland, central Europe and (...) America, this collection considers the question of whether the intellectual can still lay claim to the language of truth. In answering, this study tells us much about the modern world in which we live. _Coverage includes the following thinkers:_ Gramsci, Weber, Yeats, Auden, Levy, Mailer, Walzer, Marx and many more. (shrink)

Natural scientists have proposed that humankind has entered a new geologic epoch. Termed the “Anthropocene,” this new reality revolves around the central role of human activity in multiple Earth ecosystems. That challenge requires a rethinking of social science explanations of organization and environment relationships. In this article, we discuss the need to politicize institutional theory as a means understanding “Anthropocene Society,” and in turn what that resultant society means for the Anthropocene in the natural environment. We modify the constitutive elements (...) of institutional orders and a set of main change mechanisms to explore three scenarios around which future Anthropocene Societies might be built—Collapsing Systems, Market Rules, and Cultural Re-Enlightenment. Simultaneously, we use observations from the Anthropocene to expose limitations in present institutional theory and propose extensions to remedy them. Overall, this article challenges organizational scholars to consider a new paradigm under which research in environmental sustainability and social sustainability takes place. (shrink)

In Explaining Attitudes, Baker argues that we should treat our everyday practices as relevant to metaphysical debates, resulting in a stance of realism with respect to intentional explanations. In this chapter I will argue that if one is going to be a practical realist about anything, it should be the self, or subject of attention. I will use research on attention combined with the stance of practical realism to argue in favor of a substantive self. That is, I will present (...) an account of the self that directs and controls attention, in line with our everyday view of the self. I will contrast this account with what I call the “illusion view,” which presents the self and its apparent causal power in the case of attention as an illusion. My account of the self will make use of several of Baker's ideas, including non-reductive materialism and broad supervenience. (shrink)

Academic Placement Data and Analysis (APDA), a project funded by the American Philosophical Association (APA) and headed by Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced), aims “to make information on academic job placement useful to prospective graduate students in philosophy.” The project has just been updated to include new data, which Professor Jennings describes in a post at New APPS. She also announces a new interactive data tool with which one can sift through and sort information. (from Daily Nous).

During 1995, there was a major shift in the United Kingdom in the debate of whether it is right for nurses to strike. The Royal College of Nursing, the former advocate of a non-industrial action policy, moved towards the UNISON position that industrial action is ethical in some circumstances, as well as the necessary thing to do. The authors, both nurses and UNISON officials, look at the reasons for this change and why UNISON’s historical position sees industrial action as an (...) effective weapon in defending services, as well as wages and jobs. It can be right to strike. (shrink)

Forces including extreme economic inequality, cultural polarization, and the monetizing and privatizing of persons as commodities are undermining the forms of moral recognition and mutuality upon which democratic practices and institutions depend. These underlying factors, together with more direct modes of political corruption, manipulation, and authoritarian nationalism, are undoing Western democracies. This essay identifies and explores some vital underpinnings of democratic citizenship and civic learning that remain open to revitalization and repair. Building care structures and practices from the ground up (...) and developing inclusive and egalitarian modes of solidarity in a pluralistic society are the focus of discussion. The essay argues that solidarity and care are essential relationships and practices of moral recognition upon which democratic political agency and freedom rest. The social‐relational lifeworld and the democratic lifeworld are interdependent. Democratic citizenship is itself a relational practice that supports other practices. Democratic governance properly carried out fosters an underlying social solidarity and care and in turn draws moral and political legitimacy upward from them. (shrink)

How important is the concept of solidarity in our society's calculus of consent as regards the legitimacy and ethical and political support for public health, health policy, and health services? By the term “calculus of consent,” we refer to the answer that people give to rationalize and justify their obedience to laws, rules, and policies that benefit others. The calculus of consent answers questions such as, Why should I care? Why should I help? Why should I contribute to the public (...) provision of others? Consent here does not have to be a deliberate, explicit act of informed agreement. And a calculus does not have to be a quantifiable, quasimathematical operation; more often, such a calculus takes narrative form in stories that a society tells about itself and that individuals tell about their place in it. One vital function of bioethics is to inform and shape those stories. Bioethics has the potential to offer society a keener insight into and perception of what is ethically at stake in controversies concerning health, science, and society. This insight is what we shall refer to as a “moral imagination,” by which we do not mean make-believe or fantasy but, rather, the capacity to take a critical distance from the given, to think reality otherwise. The moral imagination enables one to see connections between factors at work in history, in large social and communal structures, and in the shape of one's own life, thoughts, and feelings. Here we are especially concerned with the contribution that the concept of solidarity can make to the moral imagination of bioethics. We contend that solidarity must become more widely active and explicit in bioethics analysis and argumentation as it endeavors to shape reasons for obeying norms and rules of common benefit in an open, diverse society. (shrink)

This book is less about disjunction than about the English word ‘or’, and it is less for than against formal logicians—more exactly, against those who maintain that formal logic can be applied in certain ways to the evaluation of reasoning formulated in ordinary English. Nevertheless, there are many things to interest such of those persons who are willing to overlook the frequent animadversions directed against their kind in the book, and this review will concentrate on them.

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 64-66.

Philosophers of science are becoming more sensitive to the claims about truth and rationality being made by sociologists of science. There is a tendency among some of these philosophers to dismiss such claims as irrelevant to philosophy of science and as self-refuting. Larry Laudan, in his 'arationality assumption', has captured the essence of positions which argue that sociology of science can only be concerned with scientific claims which are not rational (or, in some versions, 'not true'). I show that the (...) arguments he gives in support of the arationality assumption are not sound, that the arationality assumption has absurd consequences, and I argue that the arationality assumption undermines the possibility of fruitful cooperation between philosophers and sociologists of science. I conclude that the arationality assumption should be rejected. (shrink)

This article reflects on the implications of the concept of health and the questions it poses for moral philosophy, psychology, and the panoply of professions that are involved in the practices of care and in the ethics of individual rights, dignity, and autonomy. Significant among these questions is what we call “the predicament of agency.” The predicament involves the ethical tensions—arising within the broad concept of health and flourishing, but also in concrete everyday practices and relationships—between supporting individual health outcomes (...) and supporting health and flourishing through respect for autonomy and self-direction. Three ways of addressing the predicament of agency are discussed: by reinterpreting the nature and requirements of autonomy (a) by appeal to reason, (b) by designing or curating contextual conditions influencing choice (often called “choice architecture” or “nudging”) in ways that constrain autonomy but do not violate its core value, and (c) by appeal to relational judgment and reflective professional practice. The article argues that each of these lines of thought is important, but none is a panacea, and none is free from conceptual confusions and ethical pitfalls of its own. The relational approach is the most promising in pointing beyond the predicament of agency—not so much by resolving it as by showing how it can be worked through without either turning our back on caring or turning caring into management and manipulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This paper advances a new paradigm in clinical ethics education that not only emphasizes development of individual cli but also focuses on the institutional context within which health care professionals work. This approach has been applied to the goal of improving the care provided to critically and terminally ill adults. The model has been adopted by about thirty hospitals and nursing homes; additional institutions will soon join the program, entitled Decisions Near the End of Life. Here, we describe the history (...) and rationale for this approach, its goals, pedagogical assumptions, and design. (shrink)

Center for Humans and Nature, 109 West 77th Street, Suite 2, New York, NY 10024, USA. Tel.: 212 362 7170; Fax: 212 362 9592; Email: brucejennings{at}humansandnature.org ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> . Abstract A fundamental question for the ethical foundations of public health concerns the moral justification for limiting or overriding individual liberty. What might justify overriding the individual moral claim to non-interference or to self-realization? This paper argues that the libertarian justification for limiting individual (...) liberty known as the ‘harm principle’ or the ‘Millian paradigm’ is inadequate as a basis of public health ethics and policy. But simply pitting some collectivist value or utilitarian criterion over against individual liberty is not theoretically satisfactory, either. John Stuart Mill himself was not a Millian, in this sense, and his utilitarianism does not pit itself against individual liberty as a situation of balancing conflicting values. A reconsideration of Mill, particularly in light of the later work of Berlin on liberty, points toward a conception of relational liberty that is crucial for public health ethics because it contains within itself the basis for its own moral limitation. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

When feminist philosophers first turned their attention to traditional ethical theory, its almost exclusive emphasis upon justice, rights, abstract rationality, and individual autonomy came under special criticism. Women’s experiences seemed to suggest the need for a focus on care, empathetic relations, and the interdependence of persons.The most influential readings of what has become an extremely lively and fruitful debate are reproduced here along with important new contributions by Alison Jaggar and Sara Ruddick. As this volume testifies, there is no agreement (...) on the important questions about the relationship between justice and care, but the debate has deepened and enriched our understanding in many ways. Justice and Care is a valuable collection of readings—an essential tool for anyone studying the state of feminist thought in particular or ethical theory in general. (shrink)

During his lifetime, Sir Ivor Jennings was well known as the author of several standard books on constitutional law. He acted as constitutional adviser to the governments of Ceylon and Pakistan and was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ceylon. This 1956 book followed in the tradition of his earlier The British Constitution and is a clear statement by an expert with a characteristically practical point of view. It is principally concerned with a practical problem: what constitution shall be given (...) to a new country about to govern itself for the first time? Published at a time when colonial empires were moving more or less peaceably towards self-government, it was based on a series of broadcast talks originally commissioned by the BBC in the belief that the experiences gained in Asia were in principle applicable to other countries approaching self-government. (shrink)