Several prominent writers including Norman Daniels, James Sabin, Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson and Leonard Fleck advance a view of legitimacy according to which, roughly, policies are legitimate if and only if they result from democratic deliberation, which employs only public reasons that are publicised to stakeholders. Yet, the process described by this view contrasts with the actual processes involved in creating the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and in attempting to pass the Health Securities Act (HSA). Since the ACA seems to (...) be legitimate, as the HSA would have been had it passed, there seem to be counterexamples to this view. In this essay, I clarify the concept of legitimacy as employed in bioethics discourse. I then use that clarification to develop these examples into a criticism of the orthodox view–that it implies that legitimacy requires counterintuitively large sacrifices of justice in cases where important advancement of healthcare rights depends on violations of publicity. Finally, I reply to three responses to this challenge: (1) that some revision to the orthodox view salvages its core commitments, (2) that its views of publicity and substantive considerations do not have the implications that I claim and (3) that arguments for it are strong enough to support even counterintuitive results. My arguments suggest a greater role for substantive considerations than the orthodox view allows. (shrink)

Ground offers the hope of vindicating and illuminating an classic philosophical idea: the layered conception, according to which reality is structured by relations of dependence, with physical phenomena on the bottom, upon which chemistry, then biology, and psychology reside. However, ground can only make good on this promise if it is appropriately formally behaved. The paradigm of good formal behavior can be found in the currently dominant grounding orthodoxy, which holds that ground is transitive, antisymmetric, irreflexive, and foundational. However, (...) heretics have recently challenged the orthodoxy. In this paper, I examine ground’s ability to vindicate the layered conception upon various relaxations of the orthodox assumptions. I argue that highly unorthodox views of ground can still vindicate the layered conception and that, in some ways, the heretical views enable ground to better serve as a guide to reality’s layering than do orthodox views of ground. (shrink)

The sequence and escalation of Russian–Ukrainian political and military conflicts since 2014, culminating in Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, have reopened interest in and debates on just war theory and practice in general and specifically in historic and modern Eastern Orthodox cultures and Orthodox-majority states. These debates have significant repercussions in areas like church–state and church–military relations in these cultures; ecclesial involvement in these conflicts has varied from war-justification rhetoric (in the case of the Russian Orthodox Church) to (...) reiterations of the inherited traditions of ecclesial pacifism/condemnation of all violence (the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, a number of Orthodox Churches, clerical and theological networks, etc.). The Russian ecclesial involvements in the justification of war/military necessity and formulation of just war narratives have triggered divisions and antagonisms in the Eastern Orthodoxy. The development and course of the ecclesial conflicts involving Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches and parishes (and other Orthodox ecclesiastic bodies) will show whether Orthodox religious actors may begin to play a more significant role in the articulation and application of newly emerging trends in areas like the theology of just peace, just peace-making and Christian realism, Orthodox social ethics and the dynamic praxis of just peace-making. (shrink)

In Counterfactual Conditionals, Daniel Dohrn discusses the standard account of counterfactuals, conditionals of the form ‘If A had been the case, then B would have been the case’. According to the standard account, a counterfactual is true if the then-sentence is true in all closest worlds in which the if-sentence is true. Closeness is spelled out in terms of an ordering of worlds by their similarity. Dohrn explores resources of defending the standard account against several challenges. In particular, he defends (...) the standard logics for counterfactuals. He discusses exemplary doubts as to whether conditionals have truth conditions. He inquires into the interaction between truth and probability of counterfactuals. He tackles problems with the similarity ordering. He address the interaction between counterfactuals and normalcy conditions. He closes with elaborating peculiarities of future-directed counterfactuals. (shrink)

It has been almost 20 years since the field of bioethics was galvanized by a controversial series of multinational AZT trials employing placebo controls on pregnant HIV-positive women in the developing world even though a standard of care existed in the sponsor countries. The trove of ethical investigations that followed was thoughtful and challenging, yet an important and problematic methodological assumption was left unexplored. In this article, I revisit the famous “double standard of care” case study in order to (...) offer novel consideration of the placebo orthodoxy that underlies much of the ethical debate. This majority view found in medical research is that placebo-controlled trials are methodologically superior to comparative trials that use active controls. I challenge this orthodoxy and argue that lives were unnecessarily lost in these trials as a result. Furthermore, current HIV research on vaccines and microbicides is now poised to repeat the error of subscribing to the placebo orthodoxy. (shrink)

Placebo-controlled trials are held by many, including regulators at agencies like the United States Food and Drug Administration, to be the gold standard in the assessment of new medical interventions. Yet the use of placebo controls in clinical trials has been the focus of considerable controversy. In this two-part article, we challenge a number of common beliefs concerning the value of placebo controls. Part I critiques statistical and other scientific justifications for the use of placebo controls in clinical research. The (...) continued use of placebo controls in clinical trials on diseases for which accepted treatment exists raises equally important ethical, legal, and regulatory issues for which various justifications have been given. Defense of this practice relies on normative as well as empirical myths.In their attack on the prevailing use of placebo controls, Kenneth Rothman and Karin Michels emphasize that this practice stands in violation of the World Medical Association's guidelines on the ethics of human experimentation, most commonly known as the Helsinki Declaration. (shrink)

The recent global economic collapse brings new calls for reform and change as well as a re-examination of the ethical foundations underpining it. Most professors as well as students remain profoundly unhappy with the Business Curricula. The curricula appear to swing between technological training and academic theory. There is little genuine focus on the central issue of the problem: the students’ and faculty’s assumptive world which drives the selection of the materials chosen for presentation as well as the decision-making process. (...) In the pragmatic quest to achieve status within academe, business schools appear to have forgotten that their subject matter is not one cognate domain but a mixture of several areas including mathematics, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, logic and planning. Course structures must be redesigned as consilient. That is, each course contains in it the links to other courses and is not expected to be complete in themselves; the new structures proposed are no longer under the direct control of one instructor but each course is under the control of a committee. This creates a linkage between courses that together from a linked chain of knowledge where the strength of the curriculum is tied to the consilient strength of the courses. The result is an organic and developmental model for teaching and learning with a strong ethical foundation as well as developed moral links to effective decision making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Klossowski, Deleuze, and OrthodoxyEleanor Kaufman (bio)Among the many strange and wonderful things to be found there, Pierre Klossowski's oeuvre is a preeminent illustration of what divides univocity and equivocity and therefore serves as one of the twentieth century's most instructive models for thinking the complexity of the dialectic. Univocity and equivocity are significant both in their roots in Scholastic philosophy, as the idea that Being is expressed in either (...) one or several senses, and as belonging to a longstanding framework that helps demarcate the differences, nuanced yet significant, among members of the extraordinary generation of French intellectuals of which Klossowski was a part. Thus, these terms, apart from their theological and philosophical import, will serve as a heuristic for renarrating points of filiation and divergence among a series of prominent French thinkers, primarily Bataille, Klossowski, and Deleuze, but also extending backward to Sartre and forward to Badiou to frame the series. I will approach this in segmented fashion, first opposing Bataille's dialectic of transgression to Klossowski's more univocal method of disjunctive synthesis. When juxtaposed with Deleuze's Spinozist affirmation of univocity, however, Klossowski would seem to be more on the side of the equivocal. Whereas Deleuze criticizes the realm between the univocal and the equivocal as the lukewarm space of the analogical, my contention is that this middle realm allows for a space of movement and reversal that escapes the pitfalls Deleuze locates in the dialectic, and does so without a strict adherence to Spinozist univocity. Whereas Bataille and Deleuze remain closer to Klossowski in the tenor of their thought, I will nonetheless suggest in conclusion that Sartre and Badiou are actually closer to Klossowski on a formal level, in that each poses a similarly analogical challenge to the thought of the dialectic.For many reasons Bataille and Klossowski can be paired together. They were contemporaries, both born around the turn of the century, both writing in a variety of literary and philosophical genres, including pornographic or semi-pornographic fiction, and working outside the academy. Both wrote studies of Nietzsche, of Sade, and radical economic treatises. They were friends and fellow members in the late 1930s of the College of Sociology, which was modeled after a secret society, the members taking great interest in such topics as sacrifice and headlessness. Bataille and Klossowski wrote about each other. Both were at different points obsessed with Roman Catholicism, both at different points prepared to enter monastic orders, both in different fashions fell away. As might easily be imagined, their fiction is an outrageous mixture of the sacred and the profane, including sexual encounters and other desecrations staged at church alters and the like. Both work in that realm where pornography and theology come together. Yet while the more familiar Bataille uses pornography toward transgressive aims, the lesser-known Klossowski uses a more nuanced and interesting mechanism of boredom to elaborate an intrinsically disjunctive structure.Even boredom, for Bataille, partakes of the transgressive. In his novella The Story of the Eye, the narrator describes offhandedly how he and his companion Simone have just found their friend Marcelle's body. She has hung herself. The narrator and Simone [End Page 47] take the body down and have sex for the first time next to it. Then the narrator describes the boredom that ensues even in the face of death: "We were perfectly calm, all three of us, and that was the most hopeless part of it. Any boredom in the world is linked, for me, to that moment and, above all, to an obstacle as ridiculous as death. But that won't prevent me from thinking back to that time with no revulsion and even with a sense of complicity. Basically, the lack of excitement made everything far more absurd, and thus Marcelle was closer to me dead than in her lifetime, inasmuch as absurd existence, so I imagine, has all the prerogatives" [59–60]. This is actually an unusually meditative moment in Bataille's story of murder, priests, bullfights, and constant sex.1 Here his narrator links boredom to death, and to a reflection on the absurd boundary between life and death. But by commenting on boredom... (shrink)

Scientism: The New Orthodoxy is a comprehensive philosophical overview of the question of scientism, discussing the place of science in the humanities and religion. Clarifying and defining the key terms in play in discussions of scientism, this collection identifies the dimensions that differentiate science from scientism. Leading scholars appraise the means available to science, covering the impact of the neurosciences and the new challenges it presents for the law and the self. Illustrating the effect of scientism on the humanities, (...) Scientism: The New Orthodoxy addresses what science is. This provocative collection is an important contribution to the humanities in the 21st century. Contributors include: Peter Hacker, Bastian van Fraassen, Kenneth Schaffner, Roger Scruton, James K.A. Smith, Richard Swinburne, Lawrence Principe and Richard Williams. (shrink)

Protestantism and Eastern OrthodoxyThe relations between Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy span five centuries and bear upon nu-merous aspects, hence, only some items can be dealt with here. First, I discuss the late-sixteenth-century correspondence between German Lutheran theologians and Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constan-tinople, the Calvinist leanings of Patriarch Cyril Lukaris, and the influx of Protestant missionaries into traditionally Orthodox territory. Second, I outline the rise of a 'counter movement’, i.e. the Ecumeni-cal Movement, and the aim and structure of the (...) World Council of Churches, where Protestantism and Orthodoxy meet, as well as other inter-ecclesiastical organizations and theological dialogues. Third, attention is paid to tension and resistance to ecumenism; ecclesiological differences between Ortho-doxy and Protestantism; and the need for solid ecumenical formation. Fourth, I focus on the key role of worship reform and liturgical theology, inter alia, on the significance of Alexander Schmemann’s oeuvre. Fifth, interdenominational cross-fertilization with respect to worship songs and hymnals, as well as monasticism, are examined. It is, however, not all roses and therefore, sixth, I mention the challenge of stumbling blocks like prejudice and lack of communication skills. Nevertheless, in both Orthodoxy and Protestantism, freedom in Christ is the principle that matters. (shrink)

It has been a popular theory in English, Japanese, and Chinese scholarship that a “victory of Confucianism” occurred during the Han dynasty. Some members of these academic communities challenge this theory. However, it has long been overlooked that they do so by adopting different terminology and research frameworks. English scholarship uses the expression “victory/triumph of Confucianism” to refer to the dominance or growth of Confucianism during that period, while the Japanese use “the establishment of Confucian doctrine/religion as the state doctrine/religion” (...) and the Chinese use “dismissing the hundred schools and revering only the Confucian arts”. The expressions, as the current issue illustrates, exemplify three different ways of studying the history of Han Confucianism. (shrink)

The concept of orthodoxy is not prominent in the thinking of mid-twentiethcentury writers on religion. There are many reasons for this. It is, for instance, always more interesting to challenge accepted traditions than to defend them, and publishers know that radical questioning generally attracts more attention than defence of received ideas. But the task of defending orthodox beliefs is an absolute necessity for the adherents of a revealed religion. It may be unpalatable to have to examine a long succession (...) of ‘reinterpretations’ of Christianity, but it is important, since the new thinkers may often get things badly wrong, and the faithful may be seduced by superficial plausibility or flashy modernity.One can well imagine a person who has found Christianity attractive enough for him to pray and to attend church services occasionally, but whose world-view has been largely formed by the mass media, discovering one of the modern ‘reinterpreters’ of the Christian faith with an enormous feeling of relief. (shrink)

In recent decades, revisionist philosophers have radically challenged the orthodox just war theory championed by Michael Walzer in the 1970s. This review considers two new contributions to the debate, Benbaji and Statman’s War by Agreement and Ripstein’s Kant and the Law of War, which aim to defend the traditional war convention against the revisionist attack. The review investigates the two books’ respective contractarian and Kantian foundations for the war convention, their contrast with the revisionist challenge, and their points of disagreement. (...) Building on the responses to Ripstein in the edited collection, The Public Uses of Coercion and Force, and providing an overview of the broader debate, the review offers an analysis of the two books’ positions on the relationship between the morality and laws of war, on just cause and the crime of aggression, and on the equality between just and unjust combatants. (shrink)

This article provides the first historiographical analysis of the origins of Jewish Orthodoxy in Helsinki and describes the development of the rabbinate from the establishment of the congregation in the late 1850s up to the early 1980s. The origins of the Finnish Jewish community lies in the nineteenth-century Russian army. The majority of Jewish soldiers in Helsinki originated from the realm of Lithuanian Jewish culture, that is, mainly non-Hasidic Jewish Orthodoxy that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Initially, (...) the Finnish Jewish religious establishment continued this Orthodox-Litvak tradition. After the independence of Finland, the Helsinki congregation hired academic, Modern Orthodox rabbis educated in Western Europe. Following the devastation of the Shoah and the Second World War, the recruitment of rabbis faced new challenges. Overall, the rabbi recruitments were in congruence with the social and cultural development of the Helsinki community, yet respected its Orthodox roots. (shrink)

Horan offers a substantial challenge to the narrative of radical orthodoxy's idiosyncratic take on Scotus and his role in ushering in the philosophical age of the modern. This volume not only corrects the received account of Scotus but opens a constructive way forward toward a positive assessment and appropriation of Scotus's work for contemporary theology. --Book cover.

In this paper we question whether the concept of "genetic privacy" is a contradiction in terms. And, if so, whether the implications of such a conclusion, inevitably impact on how society comes to perceive privacy and responsibility generally. Current law and ethical discourse place a high value on self-determination and the rights of individuals. In the medical sphere, the recognition of patient "rights" has resulted in health professionals being given clear duties of candour and frankness. Dilemmas arise, however, when patients (...) decline to know relevant information or, knowing it, refuse to share it with others who may also need to know. This paper considers the notions of interconnectedness and responsibility to others which are brought to the fore in the genetic sphere and which challenge the primacy afforded to personal autonomy. It also explores the extent to which an individual's perceived moral obligations can or should be enforced. (shrink)

: On the Aristotelian picture of virtue, moral virtue has at its core intellectual virtue. An interesting challenge for this orthodoxy is provided by the case of universal love and its associated virtues, such as the dispositions to exhibit grace, or to forgive, where appropriate. It is difficult to find a property in the object of such love, in virtue of which grace, for example, ought to be bestowed. Perhaps, then, love in general, including universal love, is not necessarily (...) exhibited for reasons. This is the view that, with the help of Heidegger's notion of a fundamental emotional attunement, I defend. The problem is to show how universal love, and its manifestation in the virtues of universal love, can then be seen as rational. Showing this is the task of the essay. (shrink)

Deeply rooted in the Vedic tradition, animal sacrifice is a controversial issue associated with a larger discourse of violence and non-violence in South Asia. Most existent studies on Vedic killing focus on the polemics of ritual violence in six schools of Indian philosophy. However, insufficient attention has been paid to killing in Dharmaśāstric literature, the killing that is an indispensable element of a Vedic householder’s life. To fill in the gap, this paper analyzes the animal sacrifice in the Manubhāṣya of (...) Medhātithi, perhaps the most influential exegesis of the Mānavadharmaśāstra. As an important but understudied Dharmaśāstric exegesis, the Manubhāṣya provides insights on how dharmaśāstrins as protagonists of Vedic tradition understand ritual killing while dialoguing with other traditions in the complex religious landscape of the ninth century Kashmir. By investigating Medhātithi’s commentary on Mānavadharmaśāstra 5.22–56, this paper interrogates how Medhatithi interprets sacrificial killing, and how his interpretation assists to buttress the authority of the Vedic tradition represented by the root text. I argue that Medhātithi’s exegesis of killing serves as apologetics that re-establishes the Vedic sacrificial tradition, which is challenged by popular non-Vedic practices. This study intends to contribute to a better understanding of animal sacrifice situated at the intersection of Vedic, Purānic and Tantric strands, and the way in which Dharmaśāstric exegesis as apologetics engages in the negotiation of violence. (shrink)

The Response of Debrecen New Orthodoxy to Liberal Theology in Hungary. The Reformed Church of Hungary was not exempt from the impact of various theological schools of Western Europe during the nineteenth century. The historical theological school of Tübingen, the Swiss liberal and moderate theology and the Dutch ‘moderne theologie’ held a great sway on Hungarian Protestantism in particularly Reformed Theology. Parallel to this development another and distinct trend appeared as a response to the challenges posed by liberal theology, (...) which preferred traditional theological stances. In consequence not only liberal theology but also orthodox, evangelical, and pietist theologies were transferred from England, Scotland, Switzerland, Germany and France to Hungary. While Germany experienced already in the 1840s and 1850 serious theological debates, Hungarian Protestantism was late to encounter a similar debate due to the political-historical situation. It is only after the Ausgleich, the Agreement between Austrian and Hungarian aristocracy that in the era of political and national freedom theological debates surfaced and became really intense. The fiercest theological debate unfolded between the liberal theologians led by Mór Ballagi, a professor in Budapest, and the neo-orthodoxy of Debrecen Reformed University where Imre Révész sen., a local minister and Ferenc Balogh, professor of Dogma and Church History became the leading voices. This pioneering study seeks to demonstrate how the response of Debrecen neo-orthodoxy came into being in response to extremely liberal form of theology, which was organised and promoted by Mór Ballagi, a convert from Judaism to Christianity. (shrink)

The present study deals with the encounter with modernity in two neighbouring religious spaces: Christian Orthodoxy and Islam. Relying on Eisenstadt’s theory about multiple modernities and on its further developments by Thomas Mergel and Kristina Stoeckl, Islamic and Christian-Orthodox dynamics in relation to the challenges of modernity are examined under two aspects: first, the decoupling between religion and culture as elaborated by Olivier Roy, and second, the development of modernist and fundamentalist currents as phenomena of modernity. The study contributes (...) to the sketching of the profile of Islamic and the Christian-Orthodox modernities, pointing both to some of the commonalities and the differences, and inquiring the nature of their distinctiveness. Further on, it contributes to the theoretic discussion on modernity and its various, contextually shaped forms, shedding new light on the relation between the trigger of social changes and their processual character.Contribution: Inside the Christian Orthodox and the Islamic religious space the decoupling between religion and culture and the development of modernist and fundamentalist currents are analysed as markers of the second modernity that arises from the encounter of the worlds mentioned with the challenges of the first modernity. (shrink)

The 1969-72 period bas shown an evolution in the belgian european policy. White instituional orthodoxy and federalist teleology had prevailed in the sixties, some pragmatism has been added since Prime minister Gaston Eyskens met President Pompidou in Paris in june 1972. Belgium accepts the launching of a cooperation among the national foreign policies outside the sphere of the EC institutions; regular summits of heads of government are also agreed on. Pragmatism doesn't weaken however the belgian concerns about orthodoxy. (...) Belgian diplomacy is claiming a twofold orthodoxy. The "de lege fata" one insists on the compliance of the institutional practises with the legal provisions of the Treaties and on the extension of the scope of the EC policies by using the faculty provided by art. 235 EC. The constant refusal of the so called "compromis de Luxembourg" and the recurrent plea for the qualified majority voting, or the emphasis put on the powers of the Commission illustrate this kind of orthodoxy. The "de lege ferenda" orthodoxy consists of preventing institutional evolutions from closing the road to the long term federalist aims belgian diplomacy is still working towards for European integration. Hence some dilemmas between pragmatism on short term issues and some dogmatic rigidities which refer to the federalist finality. The discussion about twofold orthodoxy is grounded on a belgian positions' analysis on european affairs which covers the period from the end of the sixties to the belgian positions at the 1996 IGC. By the future perspective of a broader EU enlargement, Belgium will also face a new challenge: will its relative political weight be decreasing in the same time theUnion will extend? Which will be the price for accepting less Belgium in a larger Union? (shrink)

This article addresses issues of body and sexuality exposed by documentary films about orthodox Jewish women in Israel and traditional Islamic women in Iran, directed by Anat Yuta Zuria and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, respectively. These two groups of religious women are faced with some similar circumstances. The directors of these films use their cameras to expose not only the male gaze, but sometimes they also turn their cameras back on the men who perpetuate and benefit from religious legal systems that subjugate (...) these women. The camera thus is not merely a documentary tool but also a political tool revealing what is hidden in the inner sanctum and redeeming it from the “private sphere.” This comparison highlights the potential of Jewish feminism in Israel; it challenges it to work in alliance with Islamic women who live either as citizens in Israel or as non-citizens in the occupied territories. (shrink)

Expanding the Palace of Torah offers a broad philosophical overview of the challenges the women’s revolution poses to Orthodox Judaism, as well as Orthodox Judaism’s response to those challenges. Writing as an insider—herself an Orthodox Jew—Tamar Ross confronts the radical feminist critique of Judaism as a religion deeply entrenched in patriarchy. Surprisingly, very little work has been done in this area, beyond exploring the leeway for ad hoc solutions to practical problems as they arise on the halakhic plane. In exposing (...) the largely male-focused thrust of the rabbinic tradition and its biblical grounding, she sees this critique as posing a potential threat to the theological heart of traditional Judaism—the belief in divine revelation. This new edition brings this acclaimed and classic text back into print with a new essay by Tamar Ross which examines new developments in feminist thought since the book was first published in 2004. (shrink)

Background During the most critical phases of COVID-19 pandemic, dramatic situations were experienced in hospitals and care centers that nurses could hardly verbalize. Especially relevant were deep challenges related to terminal illness, situations of extreme sacrifice, as well as reflections on protective measures mixed with beliefs. We intend to analyze which problems had the greatest impact on professionals. Aim The aim is to explore the ultimate basis for action when making decisions and the orientation of their behavior in the face (...) of moral conflicts. Method The methodological strategy is an interpretive synthesis. Narrative review of academic articles that analyzed ethical dilemmas during the pandemic was carried out by searching five databases (Pubmed, Scopus, Psycinfo, CINHAL, and WOS) between January 2020 and December 2022. Finally, 43 articles were selected. Ethical Considerations Ethical requirements were respected in all study phases. Results The reading and review of the 43 articles initiated the first phase of inductive coding which resulted in 14 initial sub-themes. Based on this structure, a second phase of coding was carried out, giving rise to six categories or emerging themes. To facilitate the process of identifying the central category, the authors agreed to carry out a phase of synthesis, grouping the six themes into three meta-themes: the identification and acceptance of human vulnerability; the discovery of positive paradigms in traumatic situations in society; the prevalence of the common good over the particular interest, as the core structure of any society. Conclusion The study has shown the need to consider healthcare benevolence as a new dimension of health care upon global vulnerability. Responsibility is required to ensure the well-being of a global society, prioritizing the common good over particular interests and building solutions on solid moral structures. A new ethical landscape is essential, starting with a humanistic curricular training of all healthcare professionals. (shrink)

Community-based learning is one way to bring discussions about diversity and inclusion into the philosophy classroom, but it can have unintended, negative consequences if it is not carefully planned. This article is divided into four sections that utilize courses and projects in which I have participated, as both co-architect and instructor, to discuss potential negative outcomes and how to avoid them. The first section introduces the projects and courses. The second section discusses practices that nurture positive relationships between institutions of (...) higher education and communities, and pedagogical strategies to prevent reinforcing negative student perceptions about vulnerable communities. The third section discusses how curricular and pedagogical choices can challenge privilege and power both in the classroom and community experience. The final section focuses on what to do when a student resists the learning experience. I conclude with a brief reflection about the community side of this partnership. (shrink)

Responding to research indicating unsettling results with regard to the ability of University students to recognize and reflect on questions of morality, this paper aims to discuss these issues and to introduce a promising mode of ethics instruction for overcoming such challenges. The Curricular Ethics Bowl (CEB) is a method of ethics education and assessment for a wide range of students and is a descendent of the Medical Ethics Bowl (MEB) (Merrick et al., “Introducing the Medical Ethics Bowl”). We (...) seek in this article to show the similarities of CEB to MEB and to distinguish this model from the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (ICEB) sponsored by the Association for Professional and Practical Ethics (Landenson 2001). The CEB institutionalizes this mode of ethics education at the program, rather than at the individual course level, and shows advantages over other ethics curricula. (shrink)

Responding to research indicating unsettling results with regard to the ability of University students to recognize and reflect on questions of morality, this paper aims to discuss these issues and to introduce a promising mode of ethics instruction for overcoming such challenges. The Curricular Ethics Bowl (CEB) is a method of ethics education and assessment for a wide range of students and is a descendent of the Medical Ethics Bowl (MEB) (Merrick et al., “Introducing the Medical Ethics Bowl”). We (...) seek in this article to show the similarities of CEB to MEB and to distinguish this model from the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (ICEB) sponsored by the Association for Professional and Practical Ethics (Landenson 2001). The CEB institutionalizes this mode of ethics education at the program, rather than at the individual course level, and shows advantages over other ethics curricula. (shrink)

This article summarizes in three specific sections the key challenges faced by Christian and, particularly Orthodox, ethics in a secularized society. The first section, focusing on the task and aim of ethics, defines Orthodox ethics, which is linked with asceticism and aims at overcoming death and encountering the personal God. Put differently, the purpose of Orthodox ethics is the deification of human beings. The second section defines secularization and explores its consequences for the theology and pastoral work of the Church. (...) Europe is dominated by scholasticism and moralism, whereas Orthodox theology, without rejecting it, transcends such a narrow preoccupation with our own world. Orthodoxy does not regard human beings solely from the perspective of their biological existence but assists them in going beyond mechanistic theories and the pursuit of happiness. The third section briefly describes how what can be termed “bio-theology” surpasses anthropocentric ethics with regard to the relationship between creation and grace, birth and rebirth, cloning and incarnation, transplantation and deification, and death and resurrection. The article concludes that Orthodox theology does not reject the achievements of biotechnology or biomedicine; assists humans in overcoming mortality by finding meaning for their existence and fullness of life, and does not simply postpone death, but overcomes the fear of death and leads people to deification by grace. (shrink)

The inclusion of the history and philosophy of science in science teaching is widely accepted, but the actual state of implementation in schools is still poor. This article investigates possible reasons for this discrepancy. The demands science teachers associate with HPS-based teaching play an important role, since these determine teachers’ decisions towards implementing its practices and ideas. We therefore investigate the perceptions of 8 HPS-experienced German middle school physics teachers within and beyond an HPS implementation project. Within focused interviews these (...) teachers describe and evaluate the challenges of planning and conducting HPS-based physics lessons using collaboratively developed HPS teaching materials. The teachers highlight a number of obstacles to the implementation of HPS specific to this approach: finding and adapting HPS teaching material, knowing and using instructional design principles for HPS lessons, presenting history in a motivating way, dealing with students’ problematic ideas about the history of science, conducting open-ended historical classroom investigations in the light of known historical outcomes, using historical investigations to teach modern science concepts, designing assessments to target HPS-specific learning outcomes, and justifying the HPS-approach against curriculum and colleagues. Teachers' perceived demands point out critical aspects of pedagogical content knowledge necessary for confident, comfortable and effective teaching of HPS-based science. They also indicate how HPS teacher education and the design of curricular materials can be improved to make implementing HPS into everyday teaching less demanding. (shrink)

Neurosurgeons have an especially high rate of exposure to serious ethical challenges in their line of work. The aim of this study was to assess the type and frequency of ethical theories used by neurosurgery residents to make extra- ethical decisions in challenging situations and their relation with the level of residency, and curricular training about medical ethics. A total of 12 neurosurgery residents in Mashhad University of Medical Sciences (MUMS) were interviewed; all the participants were male and (...) aged 29–40 years old. Of all, six were senior and six were junior. Using a systematic review of neurosurgery and medical ethics textbooks, five common cases were selected and a semi-structured, open-ended interview was developed. The interviews were digitally recorded and analyzed in two separate stages. Comparison of the results of the two stages led us to the final judgment about the dominant ethical theory used in each case. In all 60 cases, the decision-making process was compatible with either Deontology (30 cases) or Consequentialism (30 cases). Only in two cases, beside Deontology, the Virtue ethics was used as an alternative in special situations. The ethical theories were not consistent for all the 12 subjects and all the five questions. No statistically significant difference was found between senior and junior residents, neither for each question nor for the aggregate (Odds Ratio = 1.31, 95 % CI = 0.42-4.09, Relative Risk = 1.41, 95 % CI = 0.69-1.9, P-value > 0.20). Only one of the subjects had extracurricular training in medical ethics, consequently precluding further analysis. Although not intended to be evaluated by this study, similar heterogeneity was observed in final decisions. When faced with medical ethics challenges, neurosurgery residents did not follow a consistent ethical theory for making decisions. The type and frequency of theories did not seem to be changed during the residency period. (shrink)

This article seeks to challenge the regnant liberal orthodoxy that human rights are the highest and most important of our social virtues. It questions the individualist assumptions of such universa...

In her lecture, ‘Are women peaceful?’, Professor Hilary Charlesworth outlines what she perceives to be the current orthodoxies of the international women and conflict discourse. These include assumptions that women are natural peace-builders, suffer more from conflict, have a right to participate in peace processes, and that gender should be mainstreamed. Based on Charlesworth’s analysis, the authors argue that wars and peace processes are inherently gendered affairs and as a consequence a focus on equality or mainstreaming of gender remains (...) class='Hi'>challenging. The authors also note that although equality is a useful platform for ensuring women’s participation in peace processes, feminists should not expect equality arguments to do more than they were designed to do, that is, to ensure seats for women at decision-making tables. Ensuring that women can put forth their concerns and that they are listened to demands a different set of tools. (shrink)

Risk assessment is an evidence-based analytical framework used to evaluate research findings related to environmental and public health decision-making. Different routines have been adopted for assessing the potential risks posed by substances and products to human health. In general, the traditional paradigm is a hazard-driven approach, based on a monocausal toxicological perspective. Questions have been raised about the applicability of the general chemical risk assessment approach in the specific case of nanomaterials. Most scientists and stakeholders assume that the current standard (...) methods are in principle suitable, but point out that experimental aspects and practical guidelines need specific adaptations. Beyond this laboratory level, risk assessment of nanomaterials also faces a number of substantive and procedural limitations, which are intrinsically attributed to the general orthodoxy of the risk assessment concept. Moreover, the developed formalism used to organize scientific knowledge is closely interlinked with the underlying governance design and the mode of interaction between the two spheres of ‘science’ and ‘decisions’. This contribution will provide a closer look at the evolution of different institutional settings for risk assessment in the context of decision-making. Improved risk governance frameworks with different narratives, process designs and procedural elements will be compared. The question of a general principle of enhanced organization of risk assessment will be discussed taking account of the barriers of substantive and procedural limitations in the special case of nanomaterials. (shrink)

The previous decade has seen renewed critical interest in the multiple realization argument. These criticisms constitute a "second wave" of challenges to this central argument in late-20th century philosophy of mind. Unlike the first wave, which challenged the premise that multiple realization is inconsistent with reduction or type identity, this second wave challenges the truth of the multiple realization premise itself. Since psychoneural reductionism was prominent among the explicit targets of the multiple realization argument, one might think that this second (...) wave of challenges provides important aid and comfort to reductionists. In this paper, however, I provide reasons for thinking it does not. This is not to the detriment of psychoneural reductionism because, as I also argue here, and unrecognized by the current non-reductive orthodoxy in philosophy of mind, one key argument among the first wave of criticisms of the multiple realization argument has never been adequately rejoined. (shrink)

Educational institutions all over the world continue to attract the services of foreign-born scholars. In addition to the culture shock that immigrants experience in unfamiliar countries, these scholars often undergo "pedagogical shock." Through autobiographical accounts of foreign-born professors from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the US, this volume examines the experiences of foreign-born professors around the world to provide insight on the curricular, school-systemic, and sociological differences and challenges that are encountered, and how to help resolve them. It will help (...) administrators, institutions, and immigration and comparative education scholars understand the cross-cultural challenges and coping strategies that define the private and professional lives of foreign-born professors across the globe. (shrink)

This study explores the experiences and challenges of students with hearing impairment in a Colombian university within the framework of inclusive education. Through a qualitative approach, the perceptions of students and their caregivers regarding admission policies, academic participation, and institutional and curricular environments were analyzed. The findings indicate that, although inclusion policies exist, they are not fully effective, presenting significant barriers to the access and participation of deaf students, such as insufficient availability of qualified interpreters, lack of curricular (...) adjustments, and lack of adequate infrastructure. In addition, participants pointed to attitudes of exclusion on the part of peers and university staff, as well as an institutional culture that does not fully promote diversity. The study suggests the need to strengthen inclusive strategies to guarantee the right to education in conditions of equality and respect for diversity in higher education. (shrink)

If Rome was for centuries the centre of power and influence for Christendom and the European world of learning associated with it, Brussels can claim to be such a twofold centre in the late twentieth century. The radical pluralism and postmodernist orientations which are now part of the Enlightenment legacy becloud the point that a new uniformity of belief and outlook—mercenary rather than spiritual—furnishes the context for most educational policy-making in European countries. Far from calling for a return to a (...) patriarchal past, the paper attempts to sketch an understanding of education as a universally defensible practice, while addressing the challenges of both postmodernism and the new uniformity. (shrink)

Considering this issue to be particularly significant as a research challenge for the sociologies of religion in the so-called post-socialist countries, the subject of this research has been to determine the character, status and direction of religious changes in predominantly orthodox territories of Yugoslavia and Russia that became evident in the last decade of the twentieth century marked by turbulent socio-political changes in those countries. With the subject of the research being defined in that way, the main goal of the (...) research has been to identify and examine basic tendencies in religious changes. Relying on the huge empirical material on the changes in question, an attempt has been made to precisely detect the scope of these changes in the various areas of religious, spiritual and social lives of people in the period of the so-called post-socialist transformation. Therefore, the goal of the research has not been just to determine the scope and direction of changes of religiousness with people, but also to try to set the above mentioned religious changes into the proper social context, which is the starting point in their theoretical explanation. Smatrajuci da je predlozena tema posebno znacajana kao istrazivacki izazov za sociologije religije u zemljama tzv. postsocijalizma, predmet ovog istrazivanja je odredjen kao utvrdjivanje karaktera, stanja i smera religijskih promena na pravoslavno dominantnim prostorima Jugoslavije i Rusije aktuelnim u poslednjem desetlecu burnih socijalno-politickih previranja u njima. U ovako odredjenom predmetu istrazivanja glavni zadatak istrazivanja sastoji se u identifikovanju i preispitivanju osnovnih tendencija u religijskim promenama. Oslanjajuci se na obiman empirijski materijal o pomenutim promenama, u radu treba uciniti pokusaj preciznog detektovanja obima tih promena u razlicitim sferama religijskog, duhovnog i drustvenog zivota mnostva ljudi u tzv. postsocijalistickoj transformaciji drustva. Stoga cilj istrazivanja nije samo utvrdjivanje obima i smera promena religioznosti gradjana, nego je jedan od glavnih ciljeva istrazivanja pokusaj smestanja navedenih religijskih promena u odgovarajuci drustveni kontekst od koga se polazi u njihovoj teorijskoj eksplikaciji. (shrink)

Living in the Borderland addresses the evolution of Western consciousness and describes the emergence of the "Borderland," a spectrum of reality that is beyond the rational yet is palpable to an increasing number of individuals. Building on Jungian theory, Jerome Bernstein argues that a greater openness to transrational reality experienced by Borderland personalities allows new possibilities for understanding and healing confounding clinical and developmental enigmas." "Living in the Borderland challenges the standard clinical model, which views normality as an absence of (...) pathology and which equates normality with the rational. Jerome S. Bernstein describes how psychotherapy itself often contributes to the alienation of Borderland personalities by misperceiving the difference between the pathological and the sacred. The case studies included illustrate the potential this has for causing serious psychic and emotional damage to the patient." "This challenge to the orthodoxies and complacencies of western medicine's concept of pathology will interest Jungian Analysts, Psychotherapists, Psychiatrists and other physicians, as well as educators of children. (shrink)

A prevalent scholarly view holds that Orthodox Judaism in the twentieth century was opposing or challenging modernity, since it refused to assign religion its appropriate modern place as a distinct sphere of values. The goal of this review essay is to reconsider the connection between Orthodox Judaism and modernity. Based on four recent works on Orthodox Judaism during the first decades of twentieth century, which are devoted to political mobilization, gender, theocracy, and law, the essay explores, first, the modern (...) methods whereby Orthodoxy attempted to gain a foothold in the public sphere and, second, the political philosophy of Orthodoxy, which challenges the separation of religion and state. It argues that Orthodox Judaism is a project of an alternative modernity, which strives to gain power in order to conduct a promethean reconfiguration of its surroundings. (shrink)

Reviews the special issue of The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Challenging the therapeutic state: Critical perspectives on psychiatry and the mental health system, edited by D. Cohen . This special issue serves as an update on the critique of the medical model in psychiatry. In editing this volume, Cohen has assembled a collection of work from authors in many disciplines—including some laypersons—who are concerned with what they see as the frightening power of the "Therapeutic State." While the work (...) of Thomas Szasz is a guiding light for several of these authors, they certainly are not all associated with his work. In fact, some of them explicitly disavow what they see as Szasz's overly simple stance toward madness. Moreover, the ideas in this volume expand the critique of the medical model far beyond the range of Szasz's work. Disagreements among authors are for the most part confined to a few footnotes in this volume. The book's purpose is to expose the problem before exploring solutions to it. When the volume is at its best, the papers are united by their contention that the medical model in psychiatry is disastrous both for individuals who are victimized by its institutions and practices, and for the society that embraces its disempowering philosophy. There is little, if any, brand new material in this book. Virtually all of the articles contain research and ideas tat the authors have already published elsewhere. The virtue of the book is in bringing together a diversity of work across disciplines that would not ordinarily appear between the same two covers. The common element running through all of these articles is one that the authors almost never state in so many words, but it gives a cumulative force to their very different treatments of psychiatry's problems. Each of these papers, in its own way, reveals aspects of the irrationality implicit in psychiatric orthodoxy. Psychiatry stands at the fringe of medical science, and the fringe of any science is where the inadequacies of its paradigm are most obvious. The attempt to make the medical model fit the problem of madness has not succeeded, but orthodox psychiatry continues to pursue it. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The following pages contend that, in spite of its intensive development, contemporary cognitive science has recently entered a phase of fairly acute uncertainty and confusion regarding some of its most essential foundations. They emphasize two aspects of this foundational crisis, specifically vindicating the existence of a crisis of naturalism and of a crisis of representationalism. Like any foundational crisis, this situation constitutes a serious threat to the significance of the empirical achievements of cognitive science. A threat calling for renewed efforts (...) to provide it with secure foundations that can only be obtained through acloser collaboration between empirical and foundational investigations, or, more concretely, between cognitive scientists and philosophers. They also outline a general strategy to address this threat, and illustrate itabout one aspect of particular importance of the naturalist crisis, namely the emergentist challenge to the orthodoxy of non reductive functionalism. They argue for the rejection of one version of this emergentist challenge,and they lay out a minimal condition that any other version of emergentism must meet. It is still unclear whether this condition is yet satisfactorily met by some version, and in particular by the sort of emergentism associated with the notion of dynamical system. Clarifyingthis issue should accordingly be seen as a top priority on the agenda of cognitive philosophy. (shrink)

In modern, Western societies the purpose of schooling is to ensure that school-goers acquire knowledge of pre-existing practices, events, entities and so on. The knowledge that is learned is then tested to see if the learner has acquired a correct or adequate understanding of it. For this reason, it can be argued that schooling is organised around a representational epistemology: one which holds that knowledge is an accurate representation of something that is separate from knowledge itself. Since the object of (...) knowledge is assumed to exist separately from the knowledge itself, this epistemology can also be considered ‘spatial.’ In this paper we show how ideas from complexity have challenged the spatial epistemology’ of representation and we explore possibilities for an alternative ‘temporal’ understanding of knowledge in its relationship to reality. In addition to complexity, our alternative takes its inspiration from Deweyan ‘transactional realism’ and deconstruction. We suggest that ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’ should not be understood as separate systems which somehow have to be brought into alignment with each other, but that they are part of the same emerging complex system which is never fully ‘present’ in any (discrete) moment in time. This not only introduces the notion of time into our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and reality, but also points to the importance of acknowledging the role of the ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘incalculable’. With this understanding knowledge reaches us not as something we receive but as a response, which brings forth new worlds because it necessarily adds something (which was not present anywhere before it appeared) to what came before. This understanding of knowledge suggests that the acquisition of curricular content should not be considered an end in itself. Rather, curricular content should be used to bring forth that which is incalculable from the perspective of the present. The epistemology of emergence therefore calls for a switch in focus for curricular thinking, away from questions about presentation and representation and towards questions about engagement and response. (shrink)

The article challenges the orthodoxy of current critical readings of the European crisis that discuss the failings of the EU in terms of the triumph of ‘neo-liberalism’. Defending instead a liberal view on international migration, which stresses the potentially positive economic, political and cultural benefits of market-driven forces enabling movements across borders, it details the various ways in which European regional integration has enabled the withdrawal of state control and restriction on certain forms of external and internal migration. This (...) implementation of liberal ideas on the freedom of movement of persons has largely been of benefit to migrants, and both receiving and sending societies alike. These ideas are now threatened by democratic retrenchment. It is Britain, often held up as a negative example of ‘neo-liberalism’, which has proven to be the member state that most fulfils the EU’s core adherence to principles of mobile, open, non-discriminatory labour markets. On this question, and despite its current anti-immigration politics, it offers a positive example of how Europe as a whole could benefit from more not less liberalization. (shrink)