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 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)

There has been much discussion about whether traditional epistemology's doxastic attitudes are reducible to degrees of belief. In this paper I argue that what I call the Straightforward Reduction - the reduction of all three of believing p, disbelieving p, and suspending judgment about p, not-p to precise degrees of belief for p and not-p that ought to obey the standard axioms of the probability calculus - cannot succeed. By focusing on suspension of judgment (agnosticism) rather than belief, we can (...) see why the Straightforward Reduction is bound to fail. I argue that, in general, suspending about p is not just a matter of having some specified standard credence for p, and in the end I suggest some ways to extend the arguments that will put pressure on other credence-theoretic accounts of belief and suspension of judgment as well. (shrink)

An analysis of the specific yogurt and phone microcredit schemes in Bangladesh is made along three lines of argument. It is important to note that these schemes are pulled together by NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) to assist women and children in developing areas to attain financial independence—the first line employs leftist criticism of the corporate constructs, and an additional line of inquiry compares some of the programs to those in other nations. A final line of argument analyzes the specific cultural views (...) of Bengali Islam and the long tradition of Bengali literacy. It is concluded that, despite areas of difficulty, the programs are in general beneficial. (shrink)

Background/purpose: Research from other disciplines demonstrates that ethical position, idealism, or relativism predicts ethical decision-making. Individuals from diverse cultures ascribe to various religious beliefs and studies have found that religiosity and culture affect ethical decision-making. Moreover, little literature exists regarding undergraduate nursing students’ ethical position; no studies have been conducted in the United States on students’ ethical position, their self-identified culture, and intrinsic religiosity despite an increase in the diversity of nursing students across the United States. Participants and Research Context (...) Objectives: The study’s two aims were to determine the relationship of self-identified culture, religiosity, and ethics position of undergraduate nursing student and whether students’ level of education and past ethics courses taken related to idealism. Two hundred and twelve volunteer undergraduate students participated. Research design: A descriptive cross-sectional study was designed for participants who completed the Ethical Position Questionnaire, The intrinsic subscale of the Religious Orientation Scale, and a Demographic, Cultural, Ethnicity Form. To test the five hypotheses, analyses included t-tests, correlations, and ANOVA. Ethical Considerations: The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Adelphi University. Results: Idealism and intrinsic religiosity were significantly related. Differences were observed for intrinsic religiosity and idealism for cultural identity and cultural dimensions such as parents’ place of birth, and if participants were US born. Students’ level of education or participation in past courses on ethics did not influence idealism. Conclusions: The study’s findings were similar to most of the research from other disciplines on culture, ethics position, and religiosity. Generic courses on ethics taken prior to clinical work may not assist nursing students in integrating principles into complex ethical dilemmas. Self-identified culture, religion, and intrinsic religiosity related to ethics position; completing ethics courses and level of education, juniors compared with seniors, did not influence idealism. Faculty should consider integrating students’ culture, religious orientation, and ethics position into teaching ethics for all levels of nursing education. (shrink)

This article examines changes in men's attitudes toward the family provider role using data from the National Opinion Research Center, General Social Surveys for 1972 through 1989. Men's attitudes have become more egalitarian over this period; however, men approve more of sharing provider-role enactment than of sharing provider-role responsibility. Cohort succession was a more important source of change than change within cohorts. Differences among men in attitudes toward the provider role were associated with differences in men's provider-role experiences, although there (...) was a time lag between change in actual experience and change in attitudes. The findings suggest that structural change in the economy of the family that has changed men's experience as breadwinners is the major force altering gender expectations about family roles. Attitudes among some groups of men, those not directly affected by these changes and married men who gain privileges from the breadwinner status, however, continue to reflect past ideology. (shrink)

In this article we illustrate, and argue for, the importance of researching the social context of health professionals’ ethical agendas and concerns. We draw upon qualitative interview data from 20 nurses working in two occupational health sites, and our discussion focuses mainly upon aspects of the shifting ‘ethical context’ for those nurses with a health promotion remit who are working in the British National Health Service. Within this discussion we also raise a number of potentially substantive issues, including the risks (...) of colluding in ‘double standards’, and the tensions between the practitioner and managerial roles in nursing. Overall, we hope to pose questions about the best ways to understand the ethical agency and responsibilities of health professionals. (shrink)

This essay challenges the thesis that the modern world is a ‘disenchanted’ one. I contend that enchantment has outlasted the Enlightenment; that it endures despite the demise of the ontology that allowed it paradigmatic expression in the sixteenth century writings of Paracelsus. I present two post‐medieval pictures of an enchanted world: the first appears, of all places, in Kant's Critique of Judgment, where a peculiar magic is required of nature if humans are to gain access to the ‘supersensible’ realm of (...) freedom and rational ideas; the second focuses upon the strange beauty of late modernity's admixtures of animal and human, organism and machine, the given and made. Here I use a little Kafka and lot of Deleuze to explore these hybrids as ‘technoenchantments’ operative in a world that fascinates without being expressive of a design or a will. I spotlight contemporary sites of enchantment in order to intensify the experience of them, and thus perhaps to erode the conviction that an undesigned universe calls above all for a cold‐eyed instrumentalism. (shrink)

This article argues that Maria Stewart is an underappreciated abolitionist, and a worthy exponent of the Black views of the 1830s. Her work is compared with that of David Walker, Charlotte Forten, and Anna Julia Cooper. A focal point of much of her work is her exhortation to the high moral ground—she remains concerned, throughout her career, about the temptations faced by many during the nineteenth century that might lead them to a non-Christian path. As is the case with Charlotte (...) Forten, who frequently moved for more formal education, Stewart worked ceaselessly to impel Black Americans to a worthy and virtuous life. (shrink)

Although dualism has the advantage of being intuitively plausible, it is not compatible with a 21st-century (scientific) world view. Jaak Panksepp and Antonio Damasio are contemporary writers who reject dualism, and whose views take the form of “biological naturalism”. I first discuss how their views compare in five specific respects; and then I look more closely at how the different emphases of the views affect their ability to account for the evolutionary advantages of consciousness, specifically. Both authors agree that “consciousness” (...) provides creatures with a survival advantage in terms of their ability to produce novel and/or flexible responses, their ability to plan ahead, and their motivation to promote their own survival – but the exact means by which they think these advantages are conferred, in each of these respects, differ. One might say that, whereas Damasio thinks the main evolutionary advantages of “consciousness” (the “higher reaches” of which are unique to humans) have to do with enabling creatures to work out what to do to promote their well-being, Panksepp thinks the main advantage of “consciousness” is that being “conscious” of affective feelings urgently motivates creatures to take action when their well-being is threatened. Considering that “working out what do” is only possible for a small selection of cognitively sophisticated organisms, I argue that Panksepp’s account is more plausible than Damasio’s account. (shrink)

This article explains what is meant by the creolizing of ideas and then demonstrates it through exploring a political observation about political illegitimacy made by eighteenth-century Genevan social and political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and creolized when the nineteenth-century African-American educator and social critic Anna Julia Cooper argued that the ideal of independence that lay at the core of political doctrines of republican self-governance relied on forms of willful blindness that cloaked the ongoing dependence of all human beings on one another. (...) In conclusion, the article considers what Cooper's expansion of Rousseau's insight and creolized readings of political philosophy imply for our pursuit of just political institutions today. (shrink)

Electricity systems in many parts of Europe and the United States are currently undergoing transformations that have potentially profound implications for managerial practice and the politics of user identities within these systems. After more than a century of “universal service” that provided technical goods and services to all users on essentially equal terms, utility managers are now constructing and exploiting heterogeneity and difference among users. This article explores local managerial practices within Swedish electricity in the mid-1990s, where managers promoted “brand-name” (...) electricity as a strategy for configuring identities for users, their utilities, and electricity itself. These dynamics are analyzed using theoretical perspectives from two bodies of science and technology studies on configuring users’ identities. The article then analyzes the emergent practices and their theoretical and political implications for understanding of how and why artifacts, users, and organizational entities are coconstituted in ongoing technoscientific practice in infrastructural systems. (shrink)

While we may use the Gospels and Paul’s letters to justify eating with wild abandon and enjoying every bite, we should revisit the greater principle in the New Testament: to feed others to the point of self-sacrifice in order to honor the integrity of the community.

A care deficit is clearly evident in global cities such as London and is attributable to an ageing population, the increased employment of native-born women, prevalent gender ideologies that continue to exempt men from much reproductive work, as well as the failure of the state to provide viable alternatives. However, while it is now acknowledged that migrant women, and to a lesser extent, migrant men, step in to provide care in cities such as London, there is less research on how (...) this shapes the nature, politics and ethics of care. Drawing upon empirical research with low-paid migrant workers employed as domiciliary care providers in London, this paper explores the emergence of a distinct migrant ethic of care that is critically shaped by the caring work that migrant women and men perform. (shrink)

Inspired by Theodore Schatzki’s ‘societist’ approach—in which he advocates a notion of ‘site ontologies’—in this article, we outline our theory of practice architectures and ecologies of practices. Drawing on case studies of four Australian primary schools, we examine how practices of leading relate to other educational practices: professional learning, teaching, student learning, and researching and reflecting. We find ‘leading’ not only in the work of principals and other formal leadership positions, but also in the activities of teachers and students. We (...) show that changing leading practices requires changing more than the professional practice knowledge of individuals; it also requires changing the practice architectures in sites where leading and its interconnected practices are conducted. In order to study practices of leading, we adopt a philosophical-empirical enquiry approach, i.e. we conduct our research as a conversation between practice philosophy and theory and the empirical cases of leading we study. We study practices in the mode of research within practice traditions, sometimes described as ‘practical philosophy’, as a contribution to the self-reflective transformation of the practices we are studying. (shrink)

This article examines the criteria for determining when a local authority owes a duty of care at Common Law, concurrent with statutory obligations, in light of the decisions of the House of Lords in X (Minors) v Bedfordshire County Council and M (A Minor) v Newham Borough Council. The various policy arguments employed by their Lordships are analysed and located within current debate regarding the purpose and scope of the tort of negligence. It is argued that, in relevant circumstances, English (...) courts should have regard to the European Convention on Human Rights in order to conclude whether it is ‘just and reasonable’ to impose a duty of care. The cases under discussion raised issues under several Articles of the Convention (Article 6 and Article 8, in particular), and their impact upon the decision of the House of Lords, as well as the facts themselves, is assessed. (shrink)

This article examines the principle of state immunity from the civil jurisdiction of national courts as it has been applied to officials. In Jones v Saudi Arabia the House of Lords held that individual officials should have the benefit of immunity, notwithstanding the possibility of criminal prosecution as agreed by states parties to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. It is incontrovertible as a matter of international and English law that the state itself is immune from suit in torture claims (...) but there was scant authority prior to Jones requiring the extension of immunity to individual officials. There are two key hurdles for the torture victim to surmount: first, it must be demonstrated that the forum state has jurisdiction to make and adjudicate rules regarding the relevant conduct and, secondly, that any claim to immunity should be denied. It is argued that the assertion of civil jurisdiction over torture which has taken place in another country is permissible under English rules on conflict of laws and would not be excessive in view of the recognition of criminal jurisdiction by states parties to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and under customary international law. It is further argued that to allow civil suit against the torturer (but not the state) would not offend the principles of public international law that relate to immunity, nor should it breach the State Immunity Act 1978. (shrink)

In this book, Lucy Jane Ward argues that although contemporary scholarship tends to divide Agnes Heller's work chronologically in terms of her “Marxist” and subsequent “post-Marxist” periods, a closer reading reveals her work as a continuing engagement both with and against Marx's idea of the human being rich in need.

There are curios for sale in a vacant lot: an armless mannequin next to a gramophone, bedsprings lie before a group of children who, playing, hold hands. There is a lamp suspended from a tree and a man sitting at a Louis Quinze table that stands in the open air. Clothes flap from a clothesline aboard a barge like flapping sails or even like discarded skins. In Georges Franju’s film Le Sang des bêtes/Blood of the Beasts, the violence of “displacement” (...) is seen in the juxtaposition of out-of-place curios in the vacant lot and the dismemberment of bodies in the slaughterhouse. In the slaughterhouse, a horse’s head is cleaved with a mallet. The shock of the blow, like a burst or surge of energy, gives way to the... (shrink)

Revisiting James Baldwin's under-engaged contribution to heated debates over Black (Christian)-(white) Jewish relations in New York City in the late 1960s, “Blacks Are Anti-Semitic Because They Are Anti-White,” in what follows I explore the surprising ways in which two European Jewish women political theorists, Emma Goldman and Hannah Arendt, otherwise celebrated for their rigorous sobriety, enacted the very blindness that framed their Jewishness as a form of whiteness worthy of Baldwin's criticism. I close by considering the ways of envisioning being (...) Jewish that we might build from Baldwin's reflections, ones that would, in enlarging the distance of Jewishness from whiteness, invite transformative brands of solidarity rather than specifically black forms of anti-Semitism. Ironically, this path would have entailed American Jews' becoming more fully themselves rather than indexing their advancement or flourishing through a white, Christian index. Put slightly differently, this essay turns backward to look forward, aiming to understand what I consider missed opportunities worth lamenting so we might proceed differently. (shrink)

In this analysis Jane Blanken-Webb extends Elliot Eisner's account of how learning in the arts contributes to the creation of mind. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of D. W. Winnicott, Blanken-Webb argues that the acts of meaning making to which Eisner attends rely on a prior developmental achievement — namely, the establishment of self-in-relation-to-world. This prior development is important to recognize in order to appreciate all that is at stake and at play within acts of meaning making. To demonstrate (...) this, Blanken-Webb points to reverberations of an earlier process of psychological differentiation embedded within such acts that are crucial for aesthetic experience and that carry on a continual process of refinement of self-in-relation-to-world. While Eisner has a great deal to offer regarding the importance of providing students access to multiple forms of representation, this perspective adds that in doing so we are expanding on a foundation of self-in-relation-to-world, thus facilitating an educational unfolding that is much deeper than we typically recognize. (shrink)

First published in 1918, this volume was partly based on lectures delivered by Dorothea Jane Stephen at and near Bangalore and was intended to illustrate the considerable influence exercised by the early literature of India on later Indian philosophy and culture. Examining themes of divinity and religion together with morality and human nature, the essays in this book combine to offer a fitting introduction to the importance and far-reaching effects of early Indian thought.

In this volume we will focus on how educators in high schools (grades 9-12) can incorporate the teaching of ethics effectively across all disciplines.

Increased attention to the relationship between democracy and education in the UK has been accompanied over the past thirteen years by an interest in how art can be used to promote democratic citizenship.While this approach has led to increased funding for the arts, it is not without its problems,and has often entailed an apolitical and instrumentalist view of both art and education. This paper turns to the political philosophy of Mouffe and Rancière, the work of Rancière in aesthetics, and Biesta’s (...) educational philosophy to develop an alternative way of understanding the significance of art for democracy and education. Building on their work, I take a performative and collective view of democratic subjectivity as the basis on which to construct this alternative understanding. I further argue that this conceptualisation can aid our understanding of democratic learning and our ability to provide opportunities for it through art and educational practice. (shrink)

This article illustrates how language variation and the limits of variation are given a shared and principled explanation in Optimality Theory. It shows that languages can be ‘uniform’, choosing the same grammatical structures in three different sentence types. They can also be ‘non-uniform’, but the combinations of grammatical structures that they can exhibit are extremely restricted. The theory characterizes possible and impossible grammatical systems without special stipulations or additional theoretical machinery.

The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China makes an innovative contribution to studies of language by historicizing the Chinese notion that words have "meaning" (content independent of instances of use). Rather than presuming that the concept of word-meaning had always existed, Jane Geaney explains how and why it arose in China. To account for why a normative term (yi, "duty, morality, appropriateness") came to be used for "meanings" found in dictionaries, Geaney examines interrelated patterns of word usage threading through (...) and across a wide range of genres. These patterns show that by the first millennium, as textual production exploded—and as radically different writing forms (in Buddhist sutras) were encountered—yi already functioned as an externally accessible "model" for semantic interpretation of texts and sayings. The book has far-reaching implications. Because the idea of word-meaning is fundamental to theorizing, the book illuminates not only semantic ideas and the normativity of language in Early China, but also aspects of early Chinese philosophy and intellectual history. As the internet supplants one form of media (print), thereby reducing knowledge to vast digital databases, so too, this book explains, two thousand years ago a culture that prized oral and visual balance became an "empire of the text.". (shrink)

The Current Legal Problems lecture series and annual volume was established around sixty years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and has long been recognized as a major reference point for legal scholarship. The continuing strength of Current Legal Problems is its representation of a broad range of legal scholarship opinion, theory, methodology, and subject matter, with an emphasis upon contemporary developments of law. Contributions to the 61st volume in the series include an analysis of war as (...) crime by Professor Gerry Simpson, an assessment of the problems in building a realistic climate change regime by Professor Daniel Cole, and an exploration of the problems of character evidence by Dr Mike Redmayne. (shrink)

Values -- Tolerance -- Tolerant people -- Being tolerant of family -- Being tolerant of friends -- Being tolerant of neighbours -- Ways to be tolerant -- Being aware of others -- Respecting different kinds of families -- Accepting other cultures -- Including others -- Learning from others -- Being patient -- Personal set of values.

Background The world is threatened by future pandemics. Vaccines can play a key role in preventing harm, but there will inevitably be shortages because there is no possibility of advance stockpiling. We therefore need some method of prioritising access. Main text This paper reports a critical interpretative review of the published literature that discusses ethical arguments used to justify how we could prioritise vaccine during an influenza pandemic. We found that the focus of the literature was often on proposing different (...) groups as priorities. Different reasons were often suggested as a means of justifying such priority groupings. We suggest that much of the literature, wrongly, assumes that we are able to plan priority groups prior to the time of a particular pandemic and development of a particular vaccine. We also point out the surprising absence of various issues from the literature. Conclusions The literature proposes a wide range of ways to prioritise vaccines, focusing on different groups and ‘principles’. Any plan to use pandemic vaccine must provide justifications for its prioritisation. The focus of this review was influenza pandemic vaccines, but lessons can be learnt for future allocations of coronavirus vaccine, if one becomes available. (shrink)

Current experimentations with approaches to restorative justice for adult offenders represents a compelling new direction in the criminal justice system. This book examines the values and challenges of restorative justice for adult offenders, victims and communities. The discussion is situated within current debate, available research, and the international literature. In canvassing the structure, content, and delivery of key Australian and New Zealand restorative justice programs for adult offenders, the distinguished authors offer critical analysis of the emergence and impact of program (...) developements for practitioners and professionals. This collection brings together stimulating and informed articles by experienced practitioners, leading academics and new researchers in the field. It also offers valuable insights into emerging restorative justice practice for adult offenders and provides a real alternative to the adversarial justice system. (shrink)