A large proportion of the total global burden of disease is caused by emergency medical conditions. Emergency care research is essential to improving emergency medicine but this research can raise some distinctive ethical challenges, especially with regard to (1) standard of care and risk–benefit assessment; (2) blurring of the roles of clinician and researcher; (3) enrolment of populations with intersecting vulnerabilities; (4) fair participant selection; (5) quality of consent; and (6) community engagement. Despite the importance of research to improve emergency (...) care in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) and the widely acknowledged ethical challenges, very little has been written on the ethics of emergency care research in LMICs. This paper examines the ethical and regulatory challenges to conducting emergency care research with human participants in LMICs. We outline key challenges, present potential solutions or frameworks for addressing these challenges, and identify gaps. Despite the ethical and regulatory challenges, conducting high-quality, ethical emergency care research in LMICs is possible and it is essential for global health. (shrink)

We investigate the class of those algebras in which is a de Morgan algebra, is a quasi-Stone algebra, and the operations \ and \ are linked by the identity x**º = x*º*. We show that such an algebra is subdirectly irreducible if and only if its congruence lattice is either a 2-element chain or a 3-element chain. In particular, there are precisely eight non-isomorphic subdirectly irreducible Stone de Morgan algebras.

In this essay on epistemological development in college students, I argue that “subjectivism” (a.k.a. “multiplism;” often identified in female undergraduates) should be understood and treated not as amanifestation of a primitive, irrational notion of knowing that must be exterminated and replaced by the more impersonal, detached, objective procedures embodied in scientific method and critical thinking. Rather, it should be regarded as a point of departure for moving into more reflective modes of thought when approached via, and encouraged into, the more (...) personal, empathic procedure made known in Women’s Ways of Knowing as “connected knowing.” Along the way, I develop further the difference between “connected knowing” and “separate knowing” (the latter being the dominant academic paradigm of knowing), bringing out how connected knowing is an important and at times indispensable complement to separate knowing in achieving an objectivity integrated with subjectivity. (shrink)

(1981). From individuality to character: The Herbartian sociology applied to education. British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 69-79.

This essay is a short response to comments made by Cannon, Meeks, and Yu to my articles “Beyond Subjectivism,” published in this special edition of Tradition and Discovery (34:1), and “Connected andSeparate Knowing: A Marriage of Two Minds,” published in Knowledge, Difference, and Power, edited by Nancy Goldberger, et al., focusing on convergences between my work and the ideas of Michael Polanyi.

Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government (...) spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we austerity for what it is, and what it costs us. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: What Does It Mean to Grow Old? Reflections from the Humanities. By Thomas R. Cole and Sally Gadow Our Aging Society: Paradox and Promise. Alan Pifer and Lydia Bronte.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Socrates' Trial and Conviction of the Jurors in Plato's ApologyDougal BlythI am going to argue in this paper that, in the three speeches constituting his Apology of Socrates, Plato presents the judicial proceedings that led to Socrates' execution as having precisely the opposite significance to their superficial legal meaning. This re-evaluation will lead to some reflections on the politics of Socrates' defence, and, similarly, on Plato's own aims in (...) writing the Apology. I want to show not only that the trial as portrayed demonstrates an inevitable dereliction of duty by the democratic jury, but also, more interestingly, that throughout the proceedings Socrates understands the meaning of the trial precisely in terms of his anticipation of the jurors' judicial incapacity.In the prooimion to his defence speech, Socrates requests that the jurors ignore his manner of speaking and concentrate on whether his case is just, "since this is a judge's virtue (), while that of a rhêtôr is to speak the truth" (18a5-6, cf. 35c2-5). We can gloss the expression "a judge's aretê" in this context as his function, or responsibility.1 Socrates claims that he, himself, fulfills his own responsibility as a defendant to tell the truth (17b4-c4, 33c1-2, cf. 34b5, 35b9-c2) in a speech that asserts his exemplary piety in Apollo's service and his beneficial influence on the Athenian youth. But if, in claiming that he is innocent of the charge, Socrates does tell the truth, then those jurors who thereupon convict him of impiety and corruption, and subsequently sentence him to death, have failed in their duty to judge rightly.My claim is that Socrates sees the trial as a test of the jurors' abilities. It is characteristic of Socrates to test people regarding their concern for virtue and justice, a habit to which he devotes extended discussion during his defence, even dramatising it provocatively in a central passage (29d7-e5) that I aim shortly to analyse in detail. Moreover, Socrates specifically withholds from the jury the title of dikastai or judges; he does finally award the title in his address following the sentence, but only to those who have voted [End Page 1] to acquit him (40a2-3).2 The possibility thus emerges that Socrates has treated the legal proceedings all along as a moral (and intellectual) test, or trial, of the empanelled jurors themselves, to see whether they are capable of the legal function to which they have been allotted. In that case, Socrates is putting on trial, not just those individual citizens, but the very legal system of democratic Athens.Socratic irony and truthfulnessBefore considering Socrates' own explicit judgement during those final remarks on the jurors' moral offence and punishment, I should first address briefly the issue of Socrates' irony. In the past, some writers have asserted that this irony involves him in not telling the truth about himself during his defence, in which case the jury might well have been justified in convicting him. Actually, there does seem to be a consensus among the more extended treatments of the Apology that have emerged during the last decade, at least on the point that Plato presents Socrates as committed to making as sincere an attempt at a defence of his case as is consistent with his philosophical commitment to virtue, and so to telling the truth.3I shall not re-argue this point in detail, but shall take it to be secured by two basic considerations: consistency with the Crito would require Socrates to recognise a legal obligation to make a sincere attempt at defence while his obligation to Apollo to continue his mission in Athens if possible would motivate that attempt with the goal of acquittal.4 Instead, I want to show what role irony does have in Socrates' defence, given that his principled law-abidingness requires him to attempt to persuade the jury, in accordance with truth and justice, that he is innocent (cf. 19a6-7, 18a7-b1, 18e5).Where Socrates acknowledges the obligation to defend himself, he remarks on the difficulty he faces, a difficulty that has resulted from the slander to which he has long... (shrink)

In the present essay, I explore some ways in which Polanyi’s concepts can be applied to enrich our understanding of epistemological development and the educational practices that seem to facilitate orsuppress it. Among the concepts discussed are Polanyi’s notion of uncertainty, combined with confidence as driving intellectual activity; the role of conviviality in the collaborative construction of knowledge,· the act of discovery as beginning with a problem that obsesses the thinker and proceeding through the integration of (often tacit) fragments into (...) a coherent whole; the notion of personal knowledge and commitment as transcending the disjunction between subjective and objective; apprenticeship as a personal relationship between a learner and a more sophisticated master, and most important, the assertion that beliefis prior to doubt. Thus, in terms ofthe concepts my colleagues and I have developed, “connected knowing” (a personal approach) is not simply equal to “separate knowing” (a detached, impersonal mode) as a procedure for arriving at knowledge, but is prior to it, “making meaning” being a necessary prerequisite to testing the validity ofa position. Drawing on interview data and memoirs of academic experiences, I argue that because these priorities are often reversed in educational practice, students learn to delete their personal responses from their essays in order to meet what they perceive as the utterly objective standards of the academy. When educators “endorse” uncertainty, students are encouraged to engage in the collaborative making of meaning and the pursuit of problems of personal importance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ever-Moving Soul in Plato's PhaedrusDougal BlythThe proof of the immortality of the soul at Phdr. 245c5-246a2 is unique in the dialogue for its apparent philosophical rigour and technical style, and it is peculiar in its rhetorical and mythical context.1 It is introduced as the first stage of Socrates' palinode, exhorting Phaedrus to give himself to a true lover rather than a non-lover. On this basis the philosopher will (...) then describe the course of true love (erōs) as the attempt of an older man to lead the soul of a younger whom he loves, along with his own soul, up and back to the original immortal condition of the "winged" soul which contemplates true being (246a-257b).As the groundwork upon which this vision is built the proof of the immortality of the soul deserves close study, not only of its argument, but also its rhetorical achievement and relation to the subsequent myth. It might be a parody or imitation of a Pythagorean proof, but the definition of soul and the role that plays in the implied theory appear original to Plato.2 Nevertheless, the importation of a fragment of some more extensive physical theory into a speech on love is surprising, and demands explanation.3 My procedure here involves the recovery of significant features [End Page 185] of the theory, firstly by reference to the myth, secondly by comparison with other dialogues containing related concepts and positions, and finally and most importantly by extended analysis of the physical and cosmological postulates of the argument itself.4 It should then emerge from my attention to the stages of its presentation that, as might be expected in its epideictic context, the statement of the proof involves significant rhetorical finesse. It both establishes the credibility of the subsequent myth, and, with its cosmic sweep, prepares the listener for the profundity of the latter. Moreover the proof is written so as itself to provoke that philosophical erōs for understanding which the myth then describes.I. To begin, we need some idea of what soul the proof is concerned with. The three possible meanings of the ambiguous phrase (245a5) are (i) every individual soul, (ii) one comprehensive world soul, or (iii) some common aspect of all living things, which, despite the mortality of psychophysical individuals, would be immortal in itself.5 The plurality of separate individual souls [i.e., sense (i)] is excluded by the requirements of the proof (see below), that "all soul" be one unique source of cosmic motion. No specific doctrine of a world soul [i.e., sense (ii)] is expressly stated in the Phaedrus; I shall in fact argue that the world soul is signified by the gods' chariots in the following myth, but in that case this cannot be equivalent to "all soul," since immortal souls (or fragments of soul as such) are described as entering into human and animal bodies, whereas the gods do not (248c-249d). This seems sufficient grounds to understand "all soul" as (iii)-one common soul in which we all participate insofar as we are alive; thus Plato writes "all soul cares for what is soulless (i.e., body), and travels round the whole world ('all [End Page 186] heaven', ) coming to be in different forms at different times" (246b6-7).Since the identity of the subject concerned in the proof of the immortality of "all soul" receives its only clarification subsequently in the course of the following myth, before turning to a detailed consideration of the argument I shall first survey the implications of the myth for the cosmological status of immortal soul. It is represented here as a chariot rising up to the sphere of the fixed stars, where each lesser soul follows in the train of its appointed god; and by passing beyond the outermost edge of the visible universe, insofar as it is capable, the soul studies the forms beyond, the truly divine, by proximity to which even gods are divine (249c6). Gods are thus, in this dialogue, paradigms of that divine soul which is said to circumnavigate the cosmos in governing it (246b7-c2, e5-6) and soul has its... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Nassim Taleb rightly points out that although people may acknowledge in the abstract that the world is uncertain, they still behave as if a large enough sample size is all that is needed to predict, and model, the future. He also rightly notes that ever‐increasing quantities of information are relevant only in simple situations, such as in predicting the range of human height, but are misleading in more random arenas, such as financial markets. However, while Taleb decries the use (...) of narratives for falsely forcing the facts to fit a given story, we need narratives in order to make sense of a complex world. Further, Taleb fails to take sufficient heed of the fact that human narratives themselves become objects that act on subjects in an ever‐increasing web of complexity. (shrink)

For many people, open-air preaching is associated with a particularly limited understanding of the nature of the event. In part this is related to the fact that open-air preaching has received relatively little serious academic study. From a variety of sources, however, it is possible to piece together something of a critically analytic sketch of the practice. This sketch demonstrates that not only can open-air preaching claim longevity but that in turn it is a practice with considerable diversity as open-air (...) preachers seek to make meaning through their gathering and encounter with audiences. (shrink)

Literature on racism, anti‐racism, whiteness, nursing education and nurse educators was reviewed and analysed for the development of race consciousness and application of anti‐racist pedagogy. The literature describes an oppressive educational climate for non‐white identifying people, a curriculum that does not attend to the social construction of difference, and a nursing culture that is not consciously situated in a broader sociopolitical context. A particular focus on studies of nurse educators demonstrates a stark need for personal and professional development towards effectively (...) delivering anti‐racist pedagogy and a deconstruction of white normativity and dominance amongst white faculty. The protection and reproduction of white privilege is identified through the scholarship itself through a lack of racial analysis, an externalization of the root of oppression and non‐specific study measures and outcomes. The persistence and pervasiveness of white dominance in nursing and the lack of anti‐racist competence in white educators, particularly, merits a shift in anti‐racist efforts away from short‐term skill acquisition initiatives towards the deconstruction of socialized white supremacy and enactments of white privilege in nurse educators themselves. (shrink)

Healthcare environments continue to prove discriminatory and marginalizing towards patients and healthcare workers themselves, which contributes to inequitable health outcomes across lines of socially constructed difference. This content and discourse analysis of nursing identity scholarship asks whether there is a connection between nursing identity and oppressive behaviour by examining the construction of nursing identity and the foundational discourses, sometimes in absentia, that support such a construction. Bourdieu's concepts of social fields and Audre Lorde's concept of the master's house are applied (...) as a framework towards understanding the constructs of power and status in healthcare. The analysis identifies a gap in nursing identity literature where social constructs of difference are not considered. In the reviewed literature, nursing identity has been co‐opted by the professionalization project in effort to stabilize a conceptualization of nursing's contribution to healthcare towards gaining professional and societal status. This leads to a monolithic, apolitical representation of nursing identity that erases difference, denies historical influence, universalizes nursing work and further marginalizes marginalized identities. The oppressive and hegemonic nature of a universal nursing identity may contribute to a lack of disciplinary reflexivity about the ongoing influences of foundational discursive constructs of gender, epistemology, power and professional status. (shrink)

In _Aristotle’s Ever-turning World in _Physics _8_ Blyth analyses the reasoning in Aristotle’s explanation of cosmic movement, with detailed evaluation of ancient and modern commentary on this central text in the history of ancient and medieval philosophy and science.

Market metaphors have come to dominate discourse on medical practice. In this essay, we revisit Peter Berger and colleagues’ analysis of modernization in their book The Homeless Mind and place that analysis in conversation with Max Weber’s 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation” to argue that the rise of market metaphors betokens the carry-over to medical practice of various features from the institutions of technological production and bureaucratic administration. We refer to this carry-over as the product presumption. The product presumption (...) foregrounds accidental features of medicine while hiding its essential features. It thereby confounds the public understanding of medicine and impedes the professional achievement of the excellences most central to medical practice. In demonstrating this pattern, we focus on a recent article, “Physicians, Not Conscripts—Conscientious Objection in Health Care,” in which Ronit Stahl and Ezekiel Emanuel decry conscientious refusals by medical practitioners. We demonstrate that Stahl and Emanuel’s argument depends on the product presumption, ignoring and undermining central features of good medicine. We conclude by encouraging conscientious resistance to the product presumption and the language it engenders. (shrink)

A pO -algebra $${(L; f, \, ^{\star})}$$ is an algebra in which ( L ; f ) is an Ockham algebra, $${(L; \, ^{\star})}$$ is a p -algebra, and the unary operations f and $${^{\star}}$$ commute. Here we consider the endomorphism monoid of such an algebra. If $${(L; f, \, ^{\star})}$$ is a subdirectly irreducible pK 1,1 - algebra then every endomorphism $${\vartheta}$$ is a monomorphism or $${\vartheta^3 = \vartheta}$$ . When L is finite the endomorphism monoid of L is (...) regular, and we determine precisely when it is a Clifford monoid. (shrink)

The concept of professionalism is embedded into all aspects of nursing education and practice yet is rarely critically interrogated in nursing scholarship. This paper describes how professionalism in nursing is based on whiteness. When actualized, this oppressive construct homogenizes individuals' identities to assist nurses in building and wielding power against each other and against patients, and results in dehumanization and disconnection. Foregrounding an ethic of authenticity as a practice of resistance against white professionalism offers an alternative possibility for how nursing (...) could be taught, practiced and theorized. As such a practice must begin with oneself, the authors outline a reflexive process from which to begin this work. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross‐linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim that, beyond this general tendency, communicative needs play an important role in shaping colexification patterns. We approach this question by means of a series of human experiments, using an artificial language communication game paradigm. Our results across four experiments match the previous cross‐linguistic findings: all other (...) things being equal, speakers do prefer to colexify similar concepts. However, we also find evidence supporting the communicative need hypothesis: when faced with a frequent need to distinguish similar pairs of meanings, speakadjust their colexification preferences to maintain communicative efficiency and avoid colexifying those similar meanings which need to be distinguished in communication. This research provides further evidence to support the argument that languages are shaped by the needs and preferences of their speakers. (shrink)