The phrase "applied ethics" has lost much of the charm it initially had for philosophers. Alasdair MacIntyre, Tom Beauchamp, and others pointed out a decade ago that it is a mistake to think of ethics as a body of theory that can be carted in, when necessary, to sort out some particularly messy real-world moral dilemma.(1) According to these critics' line of thought there may be good reasons to distinguish pure from applied mathematics, for example, but ethics is not (and (...) should not pretend to be) the same sort of inquiry as mathematics. Every time we advertise a course in applied ethics, we implicitly suggest a separation between theory and practice. This separation rings especially false for those of us whose philosophical orientation derives from the work of the classical American pragmatists. In this paper I want to discuss a conception of applied ethics -- call it "applying ethics" -- that is rooted in pragmatic philosophy, and to suggest a kind of practice which I think could be quite valuable both for society at large and for the society of philosophers concerned with ethics. (shrink)

“Reasonable hostility” is a norm of communicative conduct initially developed by studying public exchanges in education governance meetings in local U.S. communities. In this paper I consider the norm’s usefulness for and applicability to a U.S. state-level public hearing about a bill to legalize civil unions. Following an explication of reasonable hostility and grounded practical theory, the approach to inquiry that guides my work, I de-scribe Hawaii’s 2009, 18-hour pub-lic hearing and analyze selected segments of it. (...) I show that this par-ticular public hearing raised de-mands for testifiers on the anti-civil union side of the argument that rea-sonable hostility does not do a good job of addressing. Development of a norm of communication conduct for this practice, as well as others, must engage with the culture and time-specific beliefs that a society holds, beliefs that will shape not only how to argue but what may be argued and what must be assumed about particular categories of persons. (shrink)

This study examines the kinds of stance that but as a contrastive marker signals in Nigerian investigative public hearings, with a view to exploring the contexts in which the stances are made. The study examines forty purposively selected investigative public hearing sessions which involve interactions between complainants, defendants and a hearing panel. The data are analysed qualitatively utilising Du Bois’ interactional view of stance and Martin and White’s Appraisal system. Results indicate that but signals epistemic, evidential, (...) emotive and evaluative stances within the narrative, interrogative and closing contexts. These stances and their contextual patterns depend heavily on the roles, goals and knowledge of the participants as stancetakers who position themselves, and align with other participants and the wider discourse community in order to express evaluation and intersubjective positioning. (shrink)

How can sovereignty provide the premises to think outside of sovereignty? In other words, how is it possible to perceive of resistance to sovereignty which itself is deemed to have been caught up in the double bind of sovereignty? With a critical appraisal of theories on the ‘state of exception’ in conversation with Robert Jungk’s consideration of the ‘nuclear state’, I account for the nuclear state of exception which has acquired sovereignty in several nations in the post-Second World War scenario, (...) before going on to consider ‘spaces of exception’ to it. I then provide a critical appraisal of studies of resistance. Using the case of a public hearing on the Koodankulam nuclear power plant in south India, I account for how ways of conceptualizing contestation and challenges in the shadows of sovereignty can be pursued in what I describe as a case of ‘sovereignty without hegemony’. (shrink)

This article offers a hybrid rhetorical-qualitative discourse analysis of the FDA’s 2011 Avastin Hearing, which considered the revocation of the breast cancer indication for the popular cancer drug Avastin. We explore the multiplicity of stakeholders, the questions that motivated deliberations, and the kinds of evidence presented during the hearing. Pairing our findings with contemporary scholarship in rhetorical stasis theory, Mol’s (2002) construct of multiple ontologies, and Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe’s (2011) “hybrid forums,” we demonstrate that the FDA’s deliberative (...) procedures elides various sources of evidence and the potential multiplicity of definitions for “clinical benefit.” Our findings suggest that while the FDA invited multiple stakeholders to offer testimony, there are ways that the FDA might have more meaningfully incorporated public voices in the deliberative process. We conclude with suggestions for how a true hybrid forum might be deployed. (shrink)

New-born screening programs for congenital disorders and chronic disease are expanding worldwide and children “at risk” are identified by nationwide tracking systems at the earliest possible stage. These practices are never neutral and raise important social and ethical questions. An emergent concern is that a reflexive professionalism should interrogate the ever earlier interference in children’s lives. The Flemish community of Belgium was among the first to generalize the screening for hearing loss in young children and is an interesting case (...) to study the public justification of early interventions for families with deaf children. This article uses a critical lens to study the archive of the government child healthcare organization in Flanders in order to uncover underlying constructions of childhood, deafness, and preventive health. We focus on two interrelated themes. The first is the notion of exclusion of the human factor through the mediation of technology. The second is the idea of deafness as endangering a healthy development, an impairment that can nevertheless be treated if detected early enough. It is argued that, since deafness cannot be viewed as a life-threatening condition, the public interest which is implicitly defended is not the rescue of deaf children rather the exclusion of otherness. (shrink)

(1994). Hearing our cassandras: Ethical criticism and rhetorical receptions of Paul Ehrlich. Social Epistemology: Vol. 8, Public Indifference to Population Issues, pp. 281-288.

New-born screening programs for congenital disorders and chronic disease are expanding worldwide and children “at risk” are identified by nationwide tracking systems at the earliest possible stage. These practices are never neutral and raise important social and ethical questions. An emergent concern is that a reflexive professionalism should interrogate the ever earlier interference in children’s lives. The Flemish community of Belgium was among the first to generalize the screening for hearing loss in young children and is an interesting case (...) to study the public justification of early interventions for families with deaf children. This article uses a critical lens to study the archive of the government child healthcare organization in Flanders in order to uncover underlying constructions of childhood, deafness, and preventive health. We focus on two interrelated themes. The first is the notion of exclusion of the human factor through the mediation of technology. The second is the idea of deafness as endangering a healthy development, an impairment that can nevertheless be treated if detected early enough. It is argued that, since deafness cannot be viewed as a life-threatening condition, the public interest which is implicitly defended is not the rescue of deaf children rather the exclusion of otherness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Who Hears?A Zen Buddhist PerspectiveRobert AitkenWestern psychologists and neurologists have attempted to use their concepts to explain East Asian religions for more than seventy-five years. Carl Jung (1875–1961) wrote a long foreword to Richard Wilhelm's The Secret of the Golden Flower back in 1931, which gave many readers in Europe and the Americas their first glimpse of philosophical Daoism.1 A generation later, Erich Fromm's conversations with D. T. Suzuki (...) were recorded in Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis.2 In our own time, the Dalai Lama's collaborative work with neuroscientists and psychologists has received widespread attention,3 while academia has given James H. Austin's Zen and the Brain hearty approval.4The process of mutual understanding between Western scientists and teachers of East Asian religion is still incomplete, however, and in earlier times it had barely begun. I remember my amusement back in the 1970s, watching a video of monks trailing streams of wires attached to biofeedback instruments while they were walking formally and solemnly. Even in those early days it was apparent to me that for all their academic credentials, the scholars had started with an ignorance of the subject of their study. They were successful in measuring something in the brain relating to a samādhi condition, but while the monks may have grounded themselves more or less in a settled practice, who is to measure their appreciation of the mejiro chirping in the camellia bush just outside? Great masters of Zen, Zhaozhou, and Deshan and their successors did not talk about being settled, any more than neuroanataomists discuss the importance of the alphabet.The chirping of the mejiro might have reminded the monks of a case, a case that would lie in a dimension even further from the world of wires and dials. "Who is the master of hearing that sound?"5 This was the gist of a question by Bassui Tokushō Zenji—a question that became a public case, one kōan among many other kōans that have not been studied by science. It is time for such a study.My directory of Chinese kōans holds more than 5,500 neatly framed traditional stories set forth to guide the student.6 The modern Zen teacher is conversant with some 550 of these kōans, a number that is sufficient if... if.... There are several caveats. If the teacher treats kōans as historical artifacts, then the stories are no [End Page 89] longer kōans, and the teaching is perniciously misleading. Sometimes the teacher has gone only part way in kōan study. The great house of conventional wisdom has fallen, but he or she doesn't know it is ruined and holds forth in the old explanatory way. Sometimes the teacher has completed the long course of study, but elects to pontificate from within the wreckage of the old manor. Finally there are those who abandon the ruins completely for practice on the open road. Here is my gāthā pointing to that way:Stepping forth on the open road,I vow with all beingsTo distinguish the voices of birds,And make good use of my time.Bassui Zenji's kōan "Who is the master of hearing that sound?" could be paraphrased here at the Pālolo Zen Center as "Who is hearing that thrush singing on the railing outside?" If, in the days before I retired, a student were to respond, "I hear the thrush," I would not have approved. Bassui would not have approved. Intimacy would be missing, and intimacy is the Dao. Intimacy is the way of all the Buddhas. There is no Zen without intimacy; intimacy with what? Both the self and the thrush. That was Bassui's intention, you can be sure.Fayan met Dizang while on pilgrimage. Dizang asked, "What are you up to these days?"Fayan said, "I'm going around one pilgrimage, wherever my feet will carry me."Dizang asked, "What to you expect from pilgrimage?"Fayan said, "I don't know."Dizang said, "Not knowing is most intimate." Fayan underwent great realization. 7Zen Buddhism stresses intimacy, while in... (shrink)

The Western evangelical church has lost both the passion for and the art of reading Scripture orally in worship. This exploration of the biblical roots of reading Scripture orally examines both the Old and the New Testament evidence, noting particularly the paradigm established by Moses in Deuteronomy 31:9-13 and modeled by Ezra in Nehemiah 8 that reflects the formative reading of Scripture. Since literacy was limited and few had access to written copies of the Scriptures in ancient Israel and in (...) the early church, public hearing of the Word of God provided the primary means of inspiration and spiritual formation. The essay concludes with a discussion of the implications of the biblical evidence for evangelicals today, including specific guidelines for developing the art of reading the Scriptures in corporate worship. (shrink)

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich's recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and (...) argues that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice. (shrink)

There is a growing call for greater public involvement in establishing science and technology policy, in line with democratic ideals. A variety of public participation procedures exist that aim to consult and involve the public, ranging from the public hearing to the consensus conference. Unfortunately, a general lack of empirical consideration of the quality of these methods arises from confusion as to the appropriate benchmarks for evaluation. Given that the quality of the output of any (...) participation exercise is difficult to determine, the authors suggest the need to consider which aspects of the process are desirable and then to measure the presence or quality of these process aspects. To this end, a number of theoretical evaluation criteria that are essential for effective public participation are specified. These comprise two types: acceptance criteria, which concern features of a method that make it acceptable to the wider public, and process criteria, which concern features of the process that are liable to ensure that it takes place in an effective manner. Future research needs to develop instruments to measure these criteria more precisely and identify the contextual and environmental factors that will mediate the effectiveness of the different participation methods. (shrink)

This book is the result of an idea launched by the present editors of providing a gift to Dr. Runner in the form of a Festschrift written by former students. The response was overwhelming. Glenn Andreas, one of Dr. Runner's closest friends, and Paul Schrotenboer, secretary of the Reformed Ecumenical Synod, enthusiastically joined us, together with Bernard Zylstra of the Institute for Christian Studies and Harry Van Dyke of the Free University of Amsterdam, to form a committee for this purpose... (...) Upon the appearance of this publication the editors wish to express their sincere thanks to the members of the committee for the advice and encouragement they gave and for the work they have done. (shrink)

In his 2012 article Philosophy of Education for the Public Good: Five Challenges and an Agenda, Gert Biesta identifies five substantial issues about the future of education and the work required to address these issues. This article employs a Heideggerian reading of education to evaluate ‘Biesta’s truth’. I argue that Biesta’s point of view underestimates knowledge’s predominance and relativism; frames intentionality in pre-Heideggerian terms, which—although not a problem in itself because an individual is free to choose a particular perspective (...) on the concept—raises the issue of consistency in Biesta’s theoretical framework; and a final criticism concerns Biesta’s choice of tools for engaging with the identified challenges: The primary tools Biesta uses are intrinsic to the perspective he challenges. The use of a ‘first person perspective’ to frame pedagogy that focuses on the subject and ‘subjectification’ reaffirms the fundamental Western gesture that makes human beings subjects who ‘stand-over-and-against’ the world. I argue that it is possible to penetrate Plato’s ‘theoretical gaze’ and find a ‘weak’ alternative to an all-encompassing point of view of education through a Heideggerian approach that regards intentionality and thinking as ‘hearing’. (shrink)

The paper presents a number of empirical arguments for the perceptual view of speech comprehension. It then argues that a particular version of phenomenal dogmatism can confer immediate justification upon belief. In combination, these two views can bypass Davidsonian skepticism toward knowledge of meanings. The perceptual view alone, however, can bypass a variation on the Davidsonian argument. One reason Davidson thought meanings were not truly graspable was that he believed meanings were private (unlike behavior). But if the perceptual view of (...) speech comprehension is correct, then meanings (or at least conveyed meanings) are public objects like other perceivable entities. Hence, there is no particular problem of language comprehension, even if meanings originate in “private” mental states. (shrink)

2Public space is an old habit. The words public space are deceptive; when I hear the words, when I say the words, I’m forced to have an image of a physical place I can point to and be in. I should be thinking only of a condition; but, instead, I imagine an architectural type, and I think of a piazza, or a town square, or a city commons. Public space, I assume, without thinking about it, is a place (...) where the public gathers. The public gathers in two kinds of spaces. The first is a space that is public, a place where the public gathers because it has a right to the place; the second is a space that is made public, a place where the public gathers precisely because it doesn’t have the right—a place made public by force.3In the space that is public, the public whose space this is has agreed to be a public; these are people “in the form of the city,” they are public when they act “in the name of the city.” They “own” the city only in quotes. The establishment of certain space in the city as “public” is a reminder, a warning, that the rest of the city isn’t public. New York doesn’t belong to us, and neither does Paris, and neither does Des Moines. Setting up a public space means setting aside a public space. Public space is a place in the middle of the city but isolated from the city. Public space is the piazza, an open space separated from the closure of alleys and dead ends; public space is the piazza, a space in the light, away from the plots and conspiracies in dark smokey rooms. Vit Acconci’s latest show, entitled “Public Places,” was held in 1988 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is currently at work on a park in Detroit, a pedestrian mall in Baltimore, and a housing project in Regensburg, Germany. (shrink)

In this article Goffman's theories on participation framework and change in footing are applied to discursive material from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The main finding is that a discursive setting such as the public hearings of a truth and reconciliation commission can be highly intricate and layered when considering the role of the various discourse participants. The testifying victims, the TRC commissioners and the audience engaged in various forms of subordinate communication — byplay, crossplay and sideplay (...) — in addition to the standardized and expected interaction between victims and commissioners. This tells us that face-to-face talk should not be regarded as the prototypical participation framework, even not in a highly stage-managed discursive setting. Moreover, by paying attention to the co-presence of also a `virtual' audience, the Goffmanian framework is taken beyond its confines of only discussing interaction between discourse participants who are physically present in a speech situation. In the end, each of the discourse participants tried to exploit the possibilities offered by this complex framework, thus adding to the impact the TRC had on South African society at large. (shrink)

Gene editing in the environment must consider uncertainty about potential benefits and risks for different populations and under different conditions. There are disagreements about the weight and balance of harms and benefits. Deliberative and community‐led approaches offer the opportunity to engage and empower diverse publics to co‐create responses and solutions to controversial policy choices in a manner that is inclusive of diverse perspectives. Stories, understood as situated accounts that reflect a person's life experiences, can enable the articulation of nuanced perspectives, (...) diversify how perspectives are communicated, encourage wider participation, open dominant perspectives to challenge, and invite participants to assess appropriate empathy and precaution in collective positions. An emphasis on storytelling in deliberations on gene editing of organisms emphasizes carefully designed recruitment and facilitation to support hearing from a range of perspectives, including those that present a different set of assumptions than those that may be held by experts or other stakeholders, among these, consideration of how to understand our relationships to nature. (shrink)

The article engages with the protagonist of The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Michèle Roberts, first published in 1984 as The Wild Girl. Filipczak discusses scholarly publications that analyze the role of Mary Magdalene, and redeem her from the sexist bias which reduced her to a repentant whore despite the lack of evidence for this in the Gospels. The very same analyses demonstrate that the role of Mary Magdalene as Christ’s first apostle silenced by patriarchal tradition was unique. While (...) Roberts draws on the composite character of Mary Magdalene embedded in the traditional association between women, sexuality and sin, she also moves far beyond this, by reclaiming the female imaginary as an important part of human connection to the divine. At the same time, Roberts recovers the conjunction between sexuality and spirituality by framing the relationship of Christ and Mary Magdalene with The Song of Songs, which provides the abject saint from Catholic tradition with an entirely different legacy of autonomy and expression of female desire, be it sexual, maternal or spiritual. The intertext connected with The Song of Songs runs consistently through The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This, in turn, sensitizes the readers to the traces of the Song in the Gospels, which never quote from it, but they rely heavily on the association between Christ and the Bridegroom, while John 20 shows the encounter between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden whose imagery is strongly suggestive of the nuptial meeting in The Song of Songs. (shrink)

An inter-governmental hearing on hydrofracking for natural gas is examined. The Department of Environmental Conservation recently released an Environmental Impact Statement and takes questions from the New York State Assembly. Assembly members pose concerns with the EIS. The DEC’s responses at times appear to not address the question, but rather to challenge or rework the question in a way that can be answered from the DEC perspective. Assembly members assess seeming evasive answers in critical ways. This interactional pattern is (...) examined from a discursive analysis perspective as problem–accounts–assessments sequences. Especially notable are the discursive practices of reported speech and metadiscourse in these accounting sequences. The conflicting assessments are not based on ‘the facts’, but on which facts are relevant. The DEC can be heard as advocating for their draft of the EIS despite the concerns raised by the Assembly. At certain junctures, Assembly members accuse the DEC of being biased or evasive, which does not make for the trust needed to reach consensus. At stake in this hearing is the construction of environmental or public health risk and whether or not to permit hydrofracking. (shrink)

This chapter argues that gender equality ought to be a primary area of thought and activity for public theology, and, yet, there are very few public theologians engaging with issues of domestic violence, reproductive rights and sexual equality. ‘Public theology’ has been enjoying something of a revival in recent years, with new networks, centres and publications adopting the title; however, there is a substantial imbalance in gender representation amongst them. It seems that public theology still relies (...) upon a notion of the public sphere, drawn from the work of Jürgen Habermas, that employs a concept of reason from which women have frequently been excluded. Consequently, the prevalence of male voices in the public theology canon does little to prioritise women’s voices or issues of concern. Moreover, in so far as public theology fails to acknowledge or critique the patriarchy on which it is based, it falls short of challenging misogyny in church and society. As is all too apparent from the populist presidential campaign of Donald Trump, white evangelical support remained high, despite his overt sexism, racism and lies. His female opponent, Hillary Clinton was clearly held to a higher standard, while Christian forgiveness was poured over each of Trump’s offensive remarks. Thus, partly on the basis of the Republican opposition to abortion, large numbers of white evangelicals, including women, were prepared to cast their vote in favour of a misogynist. While there are some dissenting voices, more churches and public theologians should be speaking out against misogyny in church and society; they should be supporting women, fighting with them for justice and equality. Hence, I will conclude that public theologians need to make a greater effort to hear women’s voices, by recognising that theology takes place outside as well as inside the academy; the current #ChurchToo movement is a prime example here and an opportunity for churches and theologians to respond. (shrink)

This article describes how admissions auditions at schools of music may demonstrate and participate in what critical race theorist, Gloria Ladson-Billings, calls the full social funding of race. Julia Eklund Koza argues that the construction of musical difference, which is an effect of power and is accomplished by the materialization of styles of music, plays a role in the systemic inclusion or exclusion of people whose bodies have already been raced through a similar process of sorting and ordering. Focusing on (...) the equity implications of an access conundrum that is making many public colleges and universities more exclusionary, Koza advocates listening for Whiteness in admissions processes, not to affirm it, but to recognize its institutional presence, understand its technologies, and defund it. (shrink)

This article examines the belated reception and occlusion of the photographic work of Roy DeCarava by evaluating two recent publications: The Sound I Saw: Improvisations on a Jazz Theme (2019) and Light Break (2019). In the article, I attend to the ways in which DeCarava’s closely cropped photographs delve into the sensual, private textures of everyday life but also track as well the collective anguish and social discontent that still burns on today.

The use of virtual humans holds the potential for interactive, automated interaction in domains such as remote communication, customer service, or public announcements. For signed language users, signing avatars could potentially provide accessible content by sharing information in the signer's preferred or native language. As the development of signing avatars has gained traction in recent years, researchers have come up with many different methods of creating signing avatars. The resulting avatars vary widely in their appearance, the naturalness of their (...) movements, and facial expressions—all of which may potentially impact users' acceptance of the avatars. We designed a study to test the effects of these intrinsic properties of different signing avatars while also examining the extent to which people's own language experiences change their responses to signing avatars. We created video stimuli showing individual signs produced by a live human signer, an avatar made using computer-synthesized animation, and an avatar made using high-fidelity motion capture. We surveyed 191 American Sign Language users, including Deaf, Hard-of-Hearing, and Hearing groups. Participants rated the three signers on multiple dimensions, which were then combined to form ratings of Attitudes, Impressions, Comprehension, and Naturalness. Analyses demonstrated that the Mocap avatar was rated significantly more positively than the CS avatar on all primary variables. Correlations revealed that signers who acquire sign language later in life are more accepting of and likely to have positive impressions of signing avatars. Finally, those who learned ASL earlier were more likely to give lower, more negative ratings to the CS avatar, but we did not see this association for the Mocap avatar or the Human signer. Together, these findings suggest that movement quality and appearance significantly impact users' ratings of signing avatars and show that signed language users with earlier age of ASL acquisition are the most sensitive to movement quality issues seen in computer-generated avatars. We suggest that future efforts to develop signing avatars consider retaining the fluid movement qualities integral to signed languages. (shrink)

In this controversial new book O'Hear takes a stand against the fashion for explaining human behavior in terms of evolution. He contends that while the theory of evolution is successful in explaining the development of the natural world in general, it is of limited value when applied to the human world. Because of our reflectiveness and our rationality we take on goals and ideals which cannot be justified in terms of survival-promotion or reproductive advantage. O'Hear examines the nature of human (...) self-consciousness, and argues that evolutionary theory cannot give a satisfactory account of such distinctive facets of human life as the quest for knowledge, moral sense, and the appreciation of beauty; in these we transcend our biological origins. It is our rationality that allows each of us to go beyond not only our biological but also our cultural inheritance: as the author says in the Preface, "we are prisoners neither of our genes nor of the ideas we encounter as we each make our personal and individual way through life.". (shrink)

This article can serve as an overview of the work of Yolanda Dreyer, or as an introduction to her work, by conversing with her as a public theologian in the tradition of Schleiermacher. The article highlights her passion to listen to the voices that are normally ignored or to hear what needs to be heard to transform discourses. It investigates the contribution of Yolanda Dreyer to public theology with regard to the newspaper columns she has been writing for (...) more than 17 years. It compares aspects of her public theology with the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, which can be characterised by an internalised spirituality and a critical hermeneutic of suspicion towards the abuse of power. Gender injustice and cultural criticism are prominent themes within Dreyer's public theology. She emphasises the vocation to speak out, but also the necessity to listen. These contributions also characterise Dreyer as a pastor-theologian. (shrink)

BackgroundUp-to-date information about the trends of age-related hearing loss and how this varies between countries is essential to plan for an adequate health-system response. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the research hotpots and trends in ARHL and to provide the basis and direction for future research.Materials and methodsThe Web of Science Core Collection database was searched and screened according to the inclusion criteria during 2002–2021. Bibliometric analyses were conducted by CiteSpace software and VOSviewer software.ResultsThe query identified 1,496 publications, (...) which showed a growth trend of this filed. These publications were from 62 countries, the United States of America showed its tremendous impact on this field in publication outputs, total citations, and international collaborations, China following in second. The Journal of Hearing Research was the most productive journal. Weijia Kong published the most papers, and the most productive institution was Washington University. The keyword “presbycusis” ranked first in research frontiers and appeared earlier, and the keywords “age-related hearing loss,” “risk,” “dementia,” “auditory cortex,” “association,” and “decline” began to appear in recent years.ConclusionThe annual number of publications has grown rapidly in the past two decades and will continue to grow. Epidemiological investigation and laboratory research are lasting hot spots, besides future research will focus on the association between ARHL and cognitive decline, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 345-367 [Access article in PDF] Imagining in the Public Sphere Robert Asen Contemporary public sphere scholarship has been motivated significantly by a concern to overcome historical and conceptual exclusions in public spheres. Recent theory and criticism has investigated direct and indirect exclusions. Direct exclusions expressly prevent the participation of particular individuals and groups in public discussions and debates. Prohibitions against (...) women speaking in public, for example, have served historically to inhibit women's participation in various forums (see, e.g., Landes 1998). Indirect exclusions function tacitly through discursive norms and practices that prescribe particular ways of interacting in public forums. Indirect exclusions compel participants to conform to established modes of discourse that effectively negate the perspectives and contributions of previously directly excluded individuals and groups. Calls for "objective" and "dispassionate" debate, for instance, sometimes have restricted public agendas by portraying culturally specific forms of address as universally practiced (see, e.g., Warner 1993). Indirect exclusions may regulate discourse in various forums even when direct exclusions have been counteracted. Scholarship seeking to overcome these exclusions has proceeded on two levels. On one level, scholars have recounted the efforts of excluded persons to participate in public life despite restrictions by developing alternative modes of publicity (see, e.g., Ryan 1990; Zaeske 2002). On a second level, theorists have proposed more inclusive conceptual models of the public sphere that may overcome historical exclusions of the bourgeois public sphere while retaining a commitment to critical publicity (see, e.g., Asen 1999; Benhabib 1996; Hauser 1999; Mouffe 2000).Practicing democratic discourse fairly and justly depends indispensably on enabling inclusion. Proponents of deliberative democracy argue that political legitimacy arises from processes of inclusive public debate. Seyla Benhabib asserts that "legitimacy in complex societies must be [End Page 345] thought to result from the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all about matters of common concern" (1996, 68). Others regard inclusive public discourse as crucial for the formation of affirmative individual and collective identities. Craig Calhoun faults bourgeois notions of publicity for treating "identity formation as essentially private and prior to participation in the idealized public sphere of rational-critical discourse" (1993, 274). Identity formation entails mutual recognition among members of diverse cultures, yet theorists have observed that truncated discursive processes may inhibit mutual recognition. Charles Taylor writes that practicing a politics of recognition requires an openness toward other cultures—a presumption of value tested through sustained engagement so that "what we have formerly taken for granted as the background to valuation can be situated as one possibility alongside the background of the formerly unfamiliar culture" (1994, 67). Inclusiveness is also important for individuals and groups seeking to advance self-fashioned interpretations of their interests and needs against interpretations imposed by others. Nancy Fraser explains that self-fashioning is necessary because in public debates and controversies "who gets to establish authoritative thick definitions of people's needs is itself a political stake" (1989, 164).Although inclusion is indispensable, exclusion is never total. Sometimes, people force their way into public forums and agendas. For example, participation by activists in discussions of AIDS research and treatment often has been limited by researchers' assertions of expert privilege in investigating scientific matters. Valeria Fabj and Matthew J. Sobnosky (1995) detail how AIDS activists have responded by engaging in discursive acts of redefinition and translation to gain entry into previously circumscribed forums. At other times, people surreptitiously access public arenas. Prison writing is one way that those officially banished from public view nevertheless continue to participate in oppositional discourses and movements. Gerard A. Hauser (2001) considers how dissident Adam Michnik remained a vibrant voice in Polish civil society through his writings even after his imprisonment in the 1980s by an authoritarian regime. At still other times, typically excluded people may be invited to participate in public discussions. Members of the AIDS activist group ACT UP occasionally have testified in the traditional setting of the congressional committee hearing as invited witnesses. Daniel C. Brouwer (2001) maintains that politically sympathetic committee chairs facilitated ACT UP's "official" appearances before members of Congress. Whether invited or... (shrink)

It is not uncommon to hear that poor school performance, welfare dependancy, youth unemployment, and criminal activity result more from shortcomings in the personal makeup of individuals than from societal forces beyond their control. Are American values declining as so many suggest? And are those values at the root of many social problems today?Shaped by experience and public policies, people's values and social norms do change. What role can or should a democratic government play in shaping values? And how (...) do these values conditon the efficacy of public policy?In this book, six distinguished social scientists identify trends in America's values and their consequences, and consider public policy tools with which some of those values might be changed.Daniel Yankelovich begins with a discussion of how American values have shifted in the last half-century, and argues that affluence is the driving force behind these changes in values. James Q. Wilson argues that destructive habits which can lead to social pathologies, like crime and drug use, are set early in life; he examines how public policy might intervene when children are young to promote better values. David Popenoe maintains that America has veered too far towards industrialist values, and explores the resulting decline of families and many attendant social ills. Nathan Glazer describes the history and present status of the dispute over multicultural education. Jane Mansbridge examines the process of building cooperation, consensus, and public spirit. And George Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen discuss the problem of gang criminality.Inthe past, social scientists have often sidestepped questions about values as undefinable, unquantifiable, and somehow unscientific. The essays in this volume address these questions at last.Henry J. Aaron, director of the Economic Studies program at Brookings, is the authorof numerous books, including most recently Serious and Unstable Condition: Financing America's Health Care (1991), and coeditor of Setting Domestic Priorities (1992). Thomas E. Mann is director of the Brookings Governmental Studies program, coeditor of Media Polls in American Politics (1992), and coauthor of the Renewing Congress series (1993). Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives at Stanford University. (shrink)

The literature on conscientious objection in medicine presents two key problems that remain unresolved: Which conscientious objections in medicine are justified, if it is not feasible for individual medical practitioners to conclusively demonstrate the genuineness or reasonableness of their objections? How does one respect both medical practitioners’ claims of conscience and patients’ interests, without leaving practitioners complicit in perceived or actual wrongdoing? My aim in this paper is to offer a new framework for conscientious objections in medicine, which, by bringing (...) medical professionals’ conscientious objection into the public realm, solves the justification and complicity problems. In particular, I will argue that: an “Uber Conscientious Objection in Medicine Committee” —which includes representatives from the medical community and from other professions, as well as from various religions and from the patient population—should assess various well-known conscientious objections in medicine in terms of public reason and decide which conscientious objections should be permitted, without hearing out individual conscientious objectors; medical practitioners should advertise their conscientious objections, ahead of time, in an online database that would be easily accessible to the public, without being required, in most cases, to refer patients to non-objecting practitioners. (shrink)

There is a really big, complicated educational question that sometimes we hear and that always needs addressing, rebuffing, monitoring, and advancing but this is never going to be the last word on the matter because many things can transform it: the claim that no student should graduate from his or her high school without an understanding of what art is.Lots of people express this sentiment but in different ways. The statement could not be any clearer in its purpose. It is (...) quite positive as a statement because it is not without moral worth for it is expressing a substantial social concern. Being a popular kind of pragmatic focus statement, it surely merits an educational response. By making this comment about art... (shrink)

[Adapted from publisher-provided promotional materials by English Book Review Editor, Janny HC Leung]M. Catherine Gruber (2014) I’m Sorry for What I’ve Done: The Language of Courtroom Apologies. Oxford University Press, USA, ISBN: 978-0-19-932566-5This book examines 52 apologetic allocutions produced during federal sentencing hearings. The practice of inviting defendants to make a statement in their own behalf is a long-standing one and it is understood as offering defendants the opportunity to impress a judge or jury with their remorse, which could be (...) a factor in the sentence that is imposed. Defendants raised the topics of the offense, mitigation, future behaviour and the sentence in different ways and this book explores the pros and cons associated with the different strategies that they used. Based on corpus data, Gruber argues that the application of Austin’s (1962) performative–constative continuum reveals that offense-related utterances that fall closer to the constative end are.. (shrink)

Discussions of value play a central role in contemporary philosophy. This book considers the role of values in truth seeking, in morality, in aesthetics and also in the spiritual life. We have got beyond the simplistic view that values are simply expressions of feeling, but their precise ontological and epistemological status remains controversial. The essays in this book indicate in an accessible way the state of the discussion as it is at the end of the second millennium. The distinguished contributors (...) include Simon Blackburn, Jonathan Dancy, Paul Horwich, John Leslie, Timothy Sprigge, David Wiggins and others who have made significant contributions in this field. (shrink)

During the early twentieth century, otologists began collaborating with organizers of the New York League for the Hard of Hearing to build a bridge to “adjust the economic ratio” of deafness and create new research avenues for alleviating or curing hearing loss. This collegiality not only defined the medical discourse surrounding hearing impairment, anchoring it in hearing tests and hearing aid prescription, but, in so doing, solidified the notion that deafness was a “problem” in dire (...) need of a “solution.” Public health campaigns thus became pivotal for spreading this message on local and national levels. This paper focuses on how, from the 1920s to 1950s, as otologists became more involved with social projects for the deaf and hard of hearing — advocating lip-reading, community work, and welfare programs — at the same time, they also mandated for greater therapeutic regulation, control of hearing aid distribution, and standardization of hearing tests. The seemingly paradoxical nature of their roles continued to reinforce the stigmatization of deafness: with widespread availability of effective help, the hearing impaired were expected to seek out therapeutic or technological measures rather than live with their affliction. (shrink)

A woman is listening to Sinatra before work. As she later describes it, ‘suddenly from nowhere I could hear my mother singing along to it … I was there again home again, hearing my mother … God knows why I should choose to remember that … then, to actually hear her and I had this image in my head … of being at home … with her singing away … like being transported back you know I got one of (...) those … like shivery feelings really suddenly’ (Anderson 2004, 9-10). An older couple, discussing their honeymoon forty years ago, each say that they can’t remember the show they saw, until through iterative, puzzled cross-cuing they finally get there – ‘Desert Song, that’s it’ (Harris et al 2011, 292). An elderly English veteran of a prisoner of war camp in Japan, finishing up morning tea with a young Japanese social scientist interested in reconciliation, suddenly calls out loudly - in Japanese - ‘stand to attention’. He stands to attention in front of her: like many of the men she interviews, he physically re-enacts fragments of that long-past world of the camp, bringing that absent past into this new present context with a visceral shock (Murakami 2001, 2012; Middleton & Brown 2005, 133-136). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian ReformationGiving a Hearing to The Parallax ViewAdrian Johnston (bio)Slavoj Žižek. THE PARALLAX VIEW. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006. [PV]Near the end of a two-hour presentation at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 10, 2006, Slavoj Žižek confesses that, in terms of the intellectual ambitions nearest to his heart, “my secret dream is to be Hegel’s Luther” [“Why Only an Atheist Can Believe”]. This confession (...) comes just months after the publication of his latest major work, The Parallax View, a book described as a new magnum opus. There are ample justifications within this text to license retroactively rereading it through the lens of Žižek’s subsequent public admission that he is now preoccupied with rescuing Hegel from the numerous misinterpretations to which this giant of German idealism (who casts such a long shadow over the Continental European philosophical tradition) has been repeatedly subjected over the past two hundred years. The Parallax View, at certain points explicitly and in other places implicitly, can be seen as centered on an effort to confront aggressively the various received versions of Hegel widely accepted as official and orthodox exegetical renditions. The motif of the “parallax gap,” elaborated in a plethora of guises throughout this 2006 tome, condenses and reflects the axiomatic theses of what could be called Žižek’s Hegelian reformation.The critical assessment of The Parallax View offered here seeks to go straight to its theoretical heart by highlighting a single line of argumentation running through the full span of this text’s different moments and phases. Žižek’s own Hegelian-style conceptions of truth (as fiercely partisan rather than calmly neutral) and universality (as immanently concrete rather than transcendently abstract) validate such an interpretive approach—“universal Truth is accessible only from a partial engaged subjective position” [PV 35]. Deliberately extracting particular conceptual constellations and forcing them to link up with each other according to the plan of a certain directed philosophical agenda promises to be much more revealing of the essential features of Žižekian thought than a comprehensive survey of this latest of his major works.The specific argumentative thread to be isolated here is the new extended engagement with the terrain covered by cognitive science and the neurosciences. Apart from the task of denouncing falsifying popular pictures of Hegel, one of Žižek’s other driving ambitions in this book is the desire to formulate a fundamental ontology appropriate to the theory of subjectivity mapped out over the course of his entire intellectual itinerary (a theory informed by Kant and post-Kantian German idealism combined with Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology). And, herein, the articulation of such an ontology appropriately gets entangled, via reflections on the nature of the brain, with the latest instantiations of the perennial philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and [End Page 3] body. Žižek grants that the central nervous system is, in at least several undeniable and important senses, the material, corporeal ground of the subject, the bodily being without which there cannot be the parlêtre (speaking being). But, in the spirit of Schelling and Hegel (especially their philosophies of “productive” nature), the fashions in which Žižek attempts to tie together systematically a materialist ontology with an account of more-than-material, transontological subjectivity illuminate a normally obscured and ignored set of implied consequences flowing from the gesture of dissolving hard-and-fast dualist distinctions between body and mind, nature and spirit.The past few decades of philosophical engagement with the neurosciences, an engagement almost completely monopolized by the Anglo-American Analytic philosophical tradition and neglected by the Continental European philosophical tradition to an equal degree, has emphasized (to put this in the vernacular of German idealism) the naturalization of spirit resulting from the collapse of any strict nature-spirit dichotomy. The materialisms promoted by those Analytic philosophers amenable to grounding the mental on the neuronal simply assume that the outcome of folding mind and matter into each other is a becoming-material of the mind, namely, a naturalization of the spirit (that is, the mind comes to resemble the brain conceived of as just another part... (shrink)

Through a ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ level analysis, this study focuses on elements of questioning and question design in the Senate Judiciary hearing conducted for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Specifically, two lines of questioning are analyzed: that of Kamala Harris, D. California, and that of Ted Cruz, R. Texas. Through an analysis that builds heavily on prior research that uses Conversation Analysis to understand the news interview, this study attempts to expand such research to institutional talk done by politicians (...) in Congress. The analysis portion of the paper investigates, on a ‘micro’ level, the linguistic elements at play in each line of questioning. In the discussion section, a ‘macro’ level analysis situates the findings of this paper within the broader US political climate among the public and in terms of the growing conservatism of the Supreme Court. (shrink)

The recent struggle over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas and the credibility of Anita Hill raises in a dramatic and pointed way many of the issues at stake in theorizing the public sphere in contemporary society. At one level, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Hill’s claim that Thomas sexually harassed her constituted an exercise in democratic publicity as it has been understood in the classical liberal theory of the public sphere. The hearings opened to public scrutiny (...) a function of government, namely, the nomination and confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. They thus subjected a decision of state officials to the force of public opinion. Through the hearings, in fact, public opinion was constituted and brought to bear directly on the decision itself, affecting the process by which the decision was made as well as its substantive outcome. As a result, state officials were held accountable to the public by means of a discursive process of opinion and will formation.Yet that classical liberal view of the public sphere does not tell the whole story of these events.1 If were examine the Thomas confirmation struggle more closely, we see that the very meaning and boundaries of the concept of publicity was at stake. The way the struggle unfolded, moreover, depended at every point on who had the power to successfully and authoritatively define where the line between the public and the private would be drawn. It depended as well on who had the power to police and defend that boundary. 1. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger. Nancy Fraser is associate professor of philosophy and faculty fellow of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University, where she also teaches in the women’s studies program. She is the author of Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. She is currently working on Keywords of the Welfare State, a jointly authored book with Linda Gordon. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine two methods of public participation, namely consensus conference and public hearing. While both methods are used in order to involve the public in decision making about science and technology policy, they differ in a number of aspects. Consensus conference seeks the active participation of a selected group of citizens who are expected to elaborate cooperatively a text of recommendations. Public hearing seeks to inform the public and to collect (...) as many reactions by it as possible. In our analysis, we consider the characteristics of these two methods described in the social and political sciences literature as institutional constraints that can play a role in the production of argumentative discourse. We focus our study on the discourse produced in two concrete instances of the application of these participatory methods on the deliberation over the development of nanotechnology in France. More specifically, we study the expression of counter discourse and seek to describe how the participants in the two deliberation processes end up managing the institutional constraints in order to have their criticisms expressed. In this way, we propose a bottom-up approach to the theorization of the role that institutional context plays in the practice of argumentation, and discuss the descriptive adequacy of existing definitions of the deliberative genre within argumentation studies. (shrink)

In this article, we will consider how far we might be said to be active in forming our beliefs; in particular, we will ask to what extent we can be said to be free in believing what we want to believe. It is clear that we ought to believe only what is really so, at least in so far as it lies in our power to determine this, but reflection shows that, regrettably, we do not confine our beliefs to what (...) we have evidence for, nor do we always believe in accordance with the evidence we do have. So it is natural to conclude that non-intellectual factors may be at work here; such, at least, was the view of Descartes, who attributed error to the influence of our will in leading us to assent to judgments which go beyond the evidence presented by our infallible intellect. This view has some initial plausibility when we think of cases in which emotional considerations lead people to take up and genuinely believe things they have no evidence for, but it is not a view which has received much support from modern philosophers. So, in Part 1 we will look at criticisms levelled against Descartes' view by J. L. Evans, and in Part 2 we will see how far Descartes can be defended. Our conclusions here will lead us to give in Part 3 a general account of the influence of the will in beliefs. We will suggest that we are always responsible for our explicit beliefs, even though it is not true that we can simply believe what we like. Thus we will reject the idea that a man can consciously know something, and at the same time, by will power, believe the opposite. Belief is not then totally free, but we will argue that people do sometimes form beliefs which go against what they should and could believe, and that this can in a way be put down to the influence of the will. Finally we will consider some of the ways in which it is possible to influence our beliefs by willed acts over a long period of time, though this is not the way that we clami that the will might be said to play a part in every judgment that we make. (shrink)

“Reasonable hostility” is a norm of communicative conduct initially developed by studying public exchanges in education governance meetings in local U.S. communities. In this paper I consider the norm’s usefulness for and applicability to a U.S. state-level public hearing about a bill to legalize civil unions. Following an explication of reasonable hostility and grounded practical theory, the approach to inquiry that guides my work, I describe Hawaii’s 2009, 18-hour public hearing and analyze selected seg-ments of (...) it. I show that this particular public hearing raised demands for testifiers on the anti-civil union side of the argument that reasonable hostility does not do a good job of addressing. Development of a norm of communication conduct for this practice, as well as others, must engage with the culture and time-specific beliefs that a society holds, beliefs that will shape not only how to argue but what may be argued and what must be assumed about particular categories of persons. (shrink)

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a major piece of health care reform legislation. This comprehensive legislation includes provisions that focus on prevention, wellness, and public health. Some, including authors in this symposium, question whether Congress considered public health, prevention, and wellness issues as mere afterthoughts in the creation of PPACA. As this article amply demonstrates, they did not.This article documents the extent of congressional consideration on public health issues (...) based on personal experience working on the framework for health care reform — specifically, my experience as a Fellow for a member of the Health Subcommittee of the Senate Finance Committee from 2008-2009. I also include a review of congressional activity in the United States House of Representatives. Analysis of the congressional meetings and hearings reveals that Congress had a deep understanding about the critical need to reform the U.S. public health and prevention system. (shrink)