Rewriting the Self is an exploration of ideas of the self in the western cultural tradition from the Renaissance to the present. The contributors analyze different religious, philosophical, psychological, political, psychoanalytical and literary models of personal identity from a number of viewpoints, including the history of ideas, contemporary gender politics, and post-modernist literary theory. Challenging the received version of the "ascent of western man," they assess the discursive construction of the self in the light of political, technological and social changes. (...) Contributors include: Peter Burke, Roger Cardinal, Stephen Connor, Jonathan Dollimore, Terry Eagleton, Kate Flint, E.J. Hundert, John Mullan, Linda Nead, Daniel Pick, Nikolas Rose, Jonathan Sawday, Jane Shaw, Roger Smith, Sylvana Tomaselli and Carolyn D. Williams. (shrink)

'As an introduction to early modern thinking and the impact of past ideas on present lives, this book can find few equals and no superiors. Porter is a witty, humane writer with an extraordinary vocabulary and a sparkling sense of fun. Whether he is quoting from obscure medical texts or analysing scabrous diaries, dishing the dirt on long-dead bigwigs or evoking sympathy for human suffering, his grasp is masterly and his erudition appealing. I wish I could read it again (...) for the first time: you can.' Times Educational Supplement, Book of the Week In this startlingly brilliant sequel to the prize-winning ENLIGHTENMENT Roy Porter completes his lifetime's work, offering a magical, enthusiastic and charming account of the writings of some of the most attractive figures ever to write English. (shrink)

Psychologists, as well as other mental health professionals, face unique demands in the workplace that create increased risk for burnout. This article discusses burnout prevalence and detection, including issues of complexity regarding diagnosis and assessment. An ethical lens is utilized to explore problems that may arise due to burnout, and the ethical responsibility of practicing self-care. Recommendations for graduate clinical training programs as well as practicing professionals are suggested, including strategies for monitoring self and others for warning signs of burnout (...) and implementing self-care. (shrink)

Human engagement with nonhuman animals in motion pictures is a complex process that anthropomorphism and identification misconstrue. A superior model comes from cognitive theories of how spectators engage characters, particularly Smith , who suggests modifications to account for the nuances of spectator engagement with nonhuman animal characters. The central components of this amended model include the person schema, the three types of cues that films use to activate the person schema, and what Smith calls the "Structure of Sympathy." Such a (...) model enables us to understand better the role that moving image representations of nonhuman animals play in human-animal relationships. (shrink)

We show that for each computable ordinal $\alpha > 0$ it is possible to find in each Martin-Löf random ${\rm{\Delta }}_2^0 $ degree a sequence R of Cantor-Bendixson rank α, while ensuring that the sequences that inductively witness R’s rank are all Martin-Löf random with respect to a single countably supported and computable measure. This is a strengthening for random degrees of a recent result of Downey, Wu, and Yang, and can be understood as a randomized version of it.

Through close readings of Frost's poetry and often ignored prose, Mark Richardson argues that Frost's debates with Van Wyck Brooks, Malcolm Cowley, and H. L. Mencken informed his poetics and his poetic style just as much as did his deep identification with earlier writers like Emerson and William James.

The Journal of "Religious Ethics" marks the tercentenary of Edwards's birth with the following collection of essays. In keeping with the overall mission of the journal, this tribute takes the form of historical and constructive reflection, in which diverse perspectives on Edwards's work and diverse forms of engagement with it supplement and correct one another. Our hope is that these essays will serve both to generate interest in Edwards's work among those who are unfamiliar with him, and to advance the (...) discussion of central issues in theological and religious ethics. In this introductory essay, we will offer some reflections on Edwards's general significance for contemporary ethics, followed by a closer examination of his main texts and a brief summary of the essays collected here. (shrink)

Background Clinical ethics consultants are expected to “reduce disparities, discrimination, and inequities when providing consultations,” but few studies about inequities in ethics consultation exist.1 The objectives of this study were (1) to determine if there were racial or gender differences in the timing of requests for ethics consultations related to limiting treatment, and (2) if such differences were found, to identify factors associated with that difference and the role, if any, of ethics consultants in mitigating them. Methods The study was (...) a mixed methods retrospective study of consultation summaries and hospital and ethics center data on 56 age-and gender-matched Caucasian and African American Medicare patients who received ethics consultations related to issues around limiting medical treatment in the period 2011 to 2014. The average age of patients was 70.9. Results Consultation requests for females were made significantly earlier in their stays in the hospital (6.57 days) than were consultation requests made for males (16.07 days). For African American patients, the differences in admission-to-request intervals for female patients (5.93 days) and male patients (18.64 days) were greater than for Caucasian male and female patients. Differences in the timing of a consultation were not significantly correlated with the presence of an advance directive, the specialty of the attending physician, or the reasons for the consult request. Ethics consultants may have mitigated problems that developed during the lag in request times for African American males by spending more time, on average, on those consultations (316 minutes), especially more time, on average, than on consultations with Caucasian females (195 minutes). Most consultations (40 of 56) did result in movement toward limiting treatment, but no statistically significant differences were found among the groups studied in the movement toward limiting treatment. The average number of days from consult to discharge or death were strongly correlated with the intervals between admission to the hospital and request for an ethics consultation. Conclusion Our findings suggest race and gender disparities in the timing of ethics consultations that consultants may have partially mitigated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD IN RECENT CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY }EAN PORTER University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 0 NE OF THE MOST striking features of Catholic moral theology since Vatican II has been the reluctance of so many moral theologians, on all sides of the controversies which have characterized that discipline, to offer a substantive account of goodness and the human good as a basis (...) for understanding the moral life. There has been an extensive discussion of human goods (plural) and their relation to moral obligation, but no one, to my knowledge, has attempted to ground that discussion systematically in a substantive account of what it means to live a good human life which would precede and justify the identification of some goods as true or basic human goods. To the contrary, a number of the most influential moral theologians, led by Germain Grisez and John Finnis, insist that our knowledge of moral obligation cannot be based on any such general metaphysical or anthropological theory. Instead, they hold that morality is grounded in our recognition of certain basic goods, which are self-evident to us. My purpose in this essay is to examine the claim that some basic goods are self-evidently such to us. I will argue that Grisez and Finnis have not made a convincing case that there are selfevident basic goods. Moreover, I will argue that, to the extent that defenders of proportionalism do not challenge the GrisezFinnis account of basic goods, their alternative theories of morality are vitiated as well. I will conclude that the current debate in Catholic moral theology concerning the foundations of moral obligation might more fruitfully be cast as a debate over rival ac27 28 JEAN PORTER counts of the human good, than as a debate over the moral significance of particular goods. The Grisez/Finnis account of basic goods In order to understand the point of the account of self-evident basic goods developed by Grisez and Finnis, it will be necessary to see how this account functions in the context of their overall theory of morality.• This theory of morality begins with a general account of practical reason, which is then narrowed down into a theory of moral action, interpreted as action that is rational in the fullest possible sense. That is, this theory begins with the observation that all rational agents act in order to obtain or to preserve something that seems to be good, at least to that agent. But even the most rational agent can be mistaken as to whether this concrete desideratum is truly good, and in such a case the action is likely to be self-frustrating or even harmful to the agent (to say nothing of its consequences for others). Hence, the exigencies of practical reason itself, prior to the introduction of any properly moral consideration, force us to ask whether the seeming goods for which we act are true goods. And how are we to distinguish between true and seeming goods? Grisez and Finnis reply that the (true) good in its most general sense must be understood as that which is desirable, not only for this or that individual or in these special circumstances, but desirable per se, for every individual and in all situations. So far, this line of analysis will be familiar to anyone acquainted with scholastic philosophy. But at the next stage of the argu1 In my summary of the theory of morality put forth by Grisez and Finnis, I have relied primarily on the following works: John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Volume One: Christian Moral Principles (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983); and Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis, "Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends," The American Journal of Jurisprudence, 32 (1987), 99-151. The latter essay presents a summary of their theory including a detailed commentary on the earlier works through which it was developed, as well as responses to critics, and may be said to be the definitive statement of the Grisez/Finnis theory of morality up to now. BASIC GOODS AND THE HUMAN GOOD 29 ment, the originality... (shrink)

Our study of Moral Uncertainty in Community Health shows that community health practitioners also experience moral stress in relation to flawed systems, societal injustices, and other structural is...

First published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Last year the editors of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society invited feminists worldwide to comment on the millennial transition. Representing a disciplinary and generational range of writers, the resulting collection is at turns inspiring, troubling, provocative, despairing, celebratory. Some of the essays give voice to anxieties, others are more hopeful some reflect back, others look forward. Many of these fifty-plus short essays speak to themes of gender, nationality, global independence, transnational corporate domination, racial and ethnic identities, and (...) complex intersections among these systems. Readers will find eye-opening writing that is thoughtful, committed, and passionate about feminist futures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thucydides: Narrative and ExplanationCarolyn DewaldTim Rood. Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. xi + 339 pp. Cloth, £47.Any text has dislocations in its narrative surface. Since the time of Schwartz and Schadewaldt (1929), the text of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War has been scrutinized for its omissions, ellipses, and apparent contradictions. Scholars have thought that these would contain important clues regarding aspects [End Page 138] (...) of the war not emphasized explicitly by Thucydides in his narrative and that in addition they would help solve historiographical questions about Thucydides as an author: the nature and quality of the sources he had available to him, for instance, or, even more important, the evolution of his own understanding, over the long years in which he was observing and writing up the war. Thucydides himself provides grounds for such scholarly expectations by emphasizing that he had begun his project right at the war's beginning (1.1); he tells us in the second preface (5.26) that he was exiled after his command in the Thraceward region, and that thereafter he had a much better chance to talk to combatants on all sides. Clear stylistic differences distinguish different parts of the History; most strikingly, it breaks off mid-sentence in the narrative of the summer of 411. One can certainly see why, with this author in particular, attentive readers are tempted to take an analytical approach.Tim Rood, however, utterly rejects this temptation. Instead, he uses the tools of contemporary narratology to explore the text of Thucydides, just as it is, as the end product of authorial interpretation. He argues that Thucydides' narrative is not only written accurately to recount what happened but is also, in the most minute variations of its narrative details, an analysis of why and how the war happened as it did. Rood looks carefully at changes of perception (who "focalizes" the narrative at any given point), narrative disjunctions of time (analepsis, prolepsis, and variations in pacing), and Thucydides' handling of speech, thought, and the description of character. According to Rood, these are important clues that Thucydides provides to show us how the anticipations and perceptions of its various participants crucially shaped the Peloponnesian War.This is a careful, subtle book, and a very important one for historians as well as literary students of Thucydides. Rood is a student of S. Hornblower and C. Pelling, and in this revision of his Oxford thesis he cites the enormous secondary literature, both historical and historiographical, to excellent effect, usually in the context of precise observations about the import of individual passages. This is the first major study seriously to take into account Hornblower's Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 and 1996), and the result shows on almost every page. Even in the stretches where the minute attention to details of Thucydides' language make Rood's narrative itself read more like a commentary than an essay, the textual observations are aimed at a larger and more interesting interpretive point. In the thoughtfulness and integration of its readings of individual passages into a larger overall argument, it resembles Connor's Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), but where Connor uses a reader-response approach, arguing that Thucydides moves the reader in effect through the sequential experience of the war as it unfolds, Rood has Thucydides constructing his narrative to unpack for us as readers how the war's participants saw and thought about things and reacted to one another and how this in turn influenced how things unfolded.The book has twelve chapters, divided among five parts. The first part generally discusses temporal and focalizing strategies, concentrating on the Pylos story and the role speeches play in the narrative; the second emphasizes how [End Page 139] perception and gaps of knowledge between readers and characters as well as temporal displacement contribute to Thucydides' analysis of Peloponnesian and Athenian strengths and weaknesses in books 4 and 5. The third part explores how Athenian political life in general and the character of Nicias in particular become crucial in books 6 and 7 and shape the way the Sicilian Expedition unfolds, setting the stage for the grim years after... (shrink)

This article, a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies,” criticizes a prominent form of philosophical account of rational activity. Rational activity includes actions as varied as kicking a soccer ball and speaking a language. The philosophical accounts examined — which may be called “intellectualist” — share two features: they originate in skeptical doubt about whether what appears to be rational activity really is, and they ascribe knowledge of the norms of her activity to the person doing it. Given (...) their first feature, intellectualist accounts seek to reassure us. But they fail: the phenomenon to which they appeal in explaining rational activity — a person's grasping its norms — itself presupposes such activity. The question whether a person knows the norms of her activity is a central way of organizing the disputes of the last sixty years over whether the humanities are as intellectually legitimate as the sciences. One prominent thing it can mean to call humanities work “fuzzy” is that it is without authoritative method. Critics of the humanities may be understood as insisting that intellectual work is genuinely rational only where the thinker has in view sharply defined norms. Thus, such critics evince the same kind of concern about the legitimacy of literary or historical studies as intellectualist philosophers do about the reality of apparent soccer kicks or meaningful speech. Whatever the merit of these concerns, there is no comfort to be had in ascribing knowledge of the norms of her activity to either the literary critic or the soccer player. (shrink)

We regard cooperation as generally good, and yet this does not imply that it is morally good. The scholastic conception of nature offers the kind of distinction between levels of normative appraisal that we need, and suggests a fruitful way of thinking about the moral significance of our naturally sociable nature.

A distinct group of receptors including DCC, UNC5, RET and Ptc1 is known to function in ligand‐dependent neuronal growth and differentiation or axon guidance. Acting as “dependence receptors”, they may also regulate neuronal cell survival by inducing apoptosis in the absence of cognate ligand. Receptor‐initiated apoptosis requires proteolytic (caspase) cleavage and exposure of a pro‐apoptotic region in the cytoplasmic domains of the receptors. In contrast, classical apoptosis induced by growth factor or cytokine deprivation involves loss of survival signaling without receptor (...) cleavage. DCC, UNC5, RET and Ptc1 are downregulated or mutated in diverse cancers, and show properties characteristic of tumor suppressors, consistent with their ability to promote neuronal cell death. Dysfunctional dependence receptors have been linked to the loss of specific neurons in certain inherited and neurodegenerative diseases. Dependence receptor‐initiated apoptosis represents a novel paradigm for the controlled removal of specific cells during neural development and elimination of malignant cells that have strayed beyond regions of ligand availability. BioEssays 26:656–664, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This review explores the central themes and species ideology of Bolt, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua. All suggest incremental changes in human attitudes toward animals but all strongly confirm the mainstream view of animals as domestic companions and as models of human society. Whatever the limitations of their imagining of nonhuman existence, however, these films promise to raise awareness of some challenges faced by nonhuman animals in a human world.

L'article retrace l'histoire de l'image du peuple de Dieu comme brebis et pasteur dans l'Ecriture, dans deux figures représentatives de l'époque patristique, Augustin d'Hyppone et Grégoire de Nazianze, ainsi que dans la Constitution Dogmatique sur l'Eglise dans le Second Concile du Vatican. L'article fait une application précise de cette image au phénomène contemporain d'un changement culturel rapide dans le monde et dans l'Eglise. L'article soutient que l'image biblique des brebis et du pasteur ne doit pas être abandonnée comme un pûr (...) artifice culturel qui reflète une structure sociale primitive désormais entièrement désuète. Plutôt, cette image est une affirmation vitale et importante, tant anthropologique que ecclésiologique, sur la nature humaine, le besoin humain de communauté, d'autorité, de direction et d'attention. (shrink)