In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the _élan vital_, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist (...) discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making. (shrink)

Once we grasp Bergson’s new conception of an intuitive metaphysics premised on a distance from action, it seems unlikely that a connection could be found between this metaphysics and an activist philosophy of war. In this essay I shall revisit Bergson’s metaphysics to see how they could have been understood to provide support for war. I discuss how Bergson’s metaphysics by way of its number theoretical understanding of oneness was thought to mirror or express the limit experience of war that (...) attracted many intellectuals hungry for a shattering of conventional limits on what held up as reality. Finally I suggest that Bergson subtly changed his understanding of the élan vital in the course of the Great War, compromising in the process its initially non-teleological character in order to ensure that his doctrines would only be implicated in international peace, not jingoistic war propaganda. (shrink)

An extended discussion of Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 217 pp.

This book translates into English ten influential articles and extracts from books about Homer written in German over the past fifty years. The work of prestigious scholars such as Wolfgang Schadenwaldt, Karl Reinhardt, and Hermann Fraenkel are represented. These key works, which cover such topics as similes, the end of the Odyssey, the adventures of Odysseus, the meeting of Hector and Andromache, ring-composition, the Telemachy, and Homeric social life will now become easily accessible for the first time to teachers and (...) scholars in the English-speaking world. An accompanying introduction develops the arguments in the light of contemporary scholarly concerns. (shrink)

Objectives To investigate risk perception relating to living kidney donation, to compare the risk donors would accept with current practice and identify influential factors. Design An observational study consisting of questionnaires completed by previous living donors and the general public. Participants selected the risk they would accept from a list of options, in various scenarios. Risk communication was investigated by randomly dividing the sample and presenting risk differently. Setting Primary care (two centres) and secondary care (one centre), London. Participants 175 (...) questionnaires were sent to patients who had previously undergone living-donor nephrectomy and to members of the public consulting a general practitioner. The living-donor sample comprised 77 consecutive donors at Guy's Hospital from May 2003 to January 2005. The general-public sample was recruited from two London healthcare centres. Of the eventual 151 participants, 61 were living donors and 90 were from the general public. Main outcome measure The amount of risk a participant would accept to donate a kidney. Results 74% of participants were willing to accept a risk of death higher than 1/3000. The most commonly accepted risk was 1/2 (29%). Those presented with a ‘chance of survival’ accepted higher risks than those presented with a ‘risk of death’ (p<0.01). Greater risks were accepted when the recipient was closely related and, for some, when the recipient's prognosis was worse. No difference was observed between the living-donor and general-public groups. Conclusions Kidney donors will accept a higher risk of death than is currently quoted, especially if risks are presented in terms of chance of survival. (shrink)

Next SectionThe precise nature and scope of healthcare confidentiality has long been the subject of debate. While the obligation of confidentiality is integral to professional ethical codes and is also safeguarded under English law through the equitable remedy of breach of confidence, underpinned by the right to privacy enshrined in Article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998, it has never been regarded as absolute. But when can and should personal information be made available for statistical and research purposes and (...) what if the information in question is highly sensitive information, such as that relating to the termination of pregnancy after 24 weeks? This article explores the case of In the Matter of an Appeal to the Information Tribunal under section 57 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, concerning the decision of the Department of Health to withhold some statistical data from the publication of its annual abortion statistics. The specific data being withheld concerned the termination for serious fetal handicap under section 1(1)d of the Abortion Act 1967. The paper explores the implications of this case, which relate both to the nature and scope of personal privacy. It suggests that lessons can be drawn from this case about public interest and use of statistical information and also about general policy issues concerning the legal regulation of confidentiality and privacy in the future. (shrink)

Nurses have moral obligations incurred by membership in the profession to participate knowingly in health policy advocacy. Many barriers have historically hindered nurses from realizing their potential to advance health policy. The contemporary political context sets additional challenges to policy work due to polarization and conflict. Nursing education can help nurses recognize their role in advancing health through political advocacy in a manner that is consistent with disciplinary knowledge and ethical responsibilities. In this paper, the authors describe an exemplar of (...) Elizabeth Barrett's “Power as Knowing Participation in Change” theory as a disciplinary lens within a doctoral nursing health policy course. Barrett (radically) emphasizes “power as freedom” instead of “power as control.” This approach is congruent with nursing disciplinary values and enhances awareness of personal freedom and building collaborative relationships in the policy process. The theory was used in concert with other traditional policy content and frameworks from nursing and other disciplines. We discuss the role of nursing ethics viewed as professional responsibility for policy action, an overview of Barrett's theory, and the design of the course. Four student reflections on how the course influenced their thinking about policy advocacy are included. While not specific to policymaking, Barrett's theory provides a disciplinary grounding to increase students' awareness of freedom and choices in political advocacy participation. Our experience suggests that Barrett's work can be fruitful for enhancing nurses' awareness of choices to participate in change across settings. (shrink)

In this article we explore the underpinnings of what we view as a recent "backlash" in English law, a judicial reaction against considering children's and young people's expressions of their own feelings about treatment as their "true" wishes. We use this case law as a springboard to conceptual discussion, rooted in (a) empirical psychological work on child development and (b) three key philosophical ideas: rationality, autonomy and identity. Using these three concepts, we explore different understandings of our central theme, true (...) wishes. These different conceptual interpretations, we argue, help to elucidate important clinical questions in the area of children's informed consent to treatment. For example, how much should a child's own wishes count in making medical decisions? Does it make a difference if the child or young person is undergoing psychiatric treatment?—if in some sense her wishes are abnormal, not "true" expressions of what she really wants? If the child's wishes do not count, why not? If they do matter but count for less, how much less? We conclude by advocating functional tests of a young person's true wishes, applicable on a case-by-case basis, rather than a black-and-white distinction between "incompetent" children and "competent" adults. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Eleatic BergsonDonna Jones (bio)Suzanne Guerlac. THINKING IN TIME: AN INTRODUCTION TO HENRI BERGSON. Ithaca: Cornell UP 2006. [TT]In her Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson Suzanne Guerlac reminds her readers that the metaphysician has indeed been the subject of many hatreds, as the Bergsonist Gilles Deleuze once noted. But from this taut philosophical study one cannot easily make out any possible grounds for enmity; nor (...) were any expressed in the special Bergson issue of Modern Literary Notes edited by Guerlac. In this short review essay I shall voice some of that historic criticism, especially in regard to the social and political implications of his thought. Guerlac’s study may also win its own opponents for its sharp criticisms of Deleuze’s interpretations of Bergson and (in her reading) comically machinic view of life [TT 176–87]. This alone makes the book worth reading; it is also exhaustively researched, and I cannot remember learning as much from the footnotes of any other book.Bergson is presented here as a great metaphysician on the nature of time and space, the philosophical father of nonlinear science, and a theorist of concrete and affective individuality. Rejecting implicitly Leszek Kolakowski’s reading of two Bergsons, Guerlac presents him as neither a cosmologist who opposes life and matter nor an existentialist who retrieves consciousness by opposing time to space. Nor does he emerge as a systematic thinker in this study. In the last chapter Guerlac offers a dizzying defense of Bergson for providing the philosophical basis for cultural studies of the qualitative irreducibility of affectual states, the metaphysics of chaos theory, the critique of artificial intelligence, and the rudiments of an aesthetic theory of digital art and virtual reality.All of this follows from the epochal significance of Bergson’s metaphysical distinction between time and space as carefully grounded in the most advanced physics of his time. Guerlac does not discuss in any detail Bergson’s vitalist critiques of Darwinian biology in Creative Evolution, the work through which the metaphysical arsonist fired the modernist imagination in diverse, contradictory, and at times violent ways.1 Nor does she explore the occult and mystical themes that run throughout Bergson’s work and informed his personal and professional associations.In fact, Guerlac writes: “An explicit appeal to the social values of mystical experience in this study [The Two Sources of Morality and Religion] appeared to vindicate those who had criticized Bergson all along for being simply a mystic. And yet the title of the work, and the basis for the notion of closed and open societies, derive from scientific, not mystical discourse. They refer us to an opposition between closed and open systems in Sadi Carnot’s theories of thermodynamics” [TT 9]. Yet Bergson bases the opposition [End Page 21] between closed and open societies not in thermodynamics but in sociobiology. Having sociobiological reasons to believe in the power of the myths of closed morality on the human mind—groups that had instilled loyalty through myth and ritual had been more successful in the course of evolutionary history; that is, humans susceptible to myth have been successful in a positivist Darwinian sense—he called for the cooptation of such susceptibility by those myths and rituals that instilled loyalty to humanity as such. Humanity could dynamically extend the scope of sociability rather than follow the roles and customs that maintained a closed society in static equilibrium. Though Bergson would later courageously risk pneumonia to stand as an old man in the cold rain to register as a Jew in Vichy France, he claimed in this last book from 1932 that the only complete inspiration for universal openness could be found in Christian mysticism and mythology [Two Sources 227]. He explicitly criticized the insularity of the Judaic religion (and caricatured Eastern forms of mysticism). In other words, Bergson put his faith in Christian mystics alone and thus invited the charge of having laid the foundation for mystical and intolerant leadership.Bergson’s universal humanism also crashed on the limits of colonial racism. In considering closed primitive societies, Bergson called attention to missionary stories full of detailed accounts of childish and monstrous deeds. He implored his... (shrink)

The Lotus Sutra: A Biography, by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Princeton University Press, 2016. 272pp. Hb. £24.95. ISBN-13: 9780691152202. E-book. £18.99. ISBN: 9781400883349.

Winner of the 2021 Toshihide Numata Book Award in Buddhism The assertion that there is nothing in the constitution of any person that deserves to be considered the self (ātman)—a permanent, unchanging kernel of personal identity in this life and those to come—has been a cornerstone of Buddhist teaching from its inception. Whereas other Indian religious systems celebrated the search for and potential discovery of one’s “true self,” Buddhism taught about the futility of searching for anything in our experience that (...) is not transient and ephemeral. But a small yet influential set of Mahāyāna Buddhist texts, composed in India in the early centuries CE, taught that all sentient beings possess at all times, and across their successive lives, the enduring and superlatively precious nature of a Buddha. This was taught with reference to the enigmatic expression tathāgatagarbha—the “womb” or “chamber” for a Buddha—which some texts refer to as a person’s true self. The Buddhist Self is a methodical examination of Indian teaching about the tathāgatagarbha (otherwise the presence of one’s “Buddha-nature”) and the extent to which different Buddhist texts and authors articulated this in terms of the self. C. V. Jones attends to each of the Indian Buddhist works responsible for explaining what is meant by the expression tathāgatagarbha, and how far this should be understood or promoted using the language of selfhood. With close attention to these sources, Jones argues that the trajectory of Buddha-nature thought in India is also the history and legacy of a Buddhist account of what deserves to be called the self: an innovative attempt to equip Mahāyāna Buddhism with an affirmative response to wider Indian interest in the discovery of something precious or even divine in one’s own constitution. This argument is supplemented by critical consideration of other themes that run through this distinctive body of Mahāyānist literature: the relationship between Buddhist and non-Buddhist teachings about the self, the overlap between the tathāgatagarbha and the nature of the mind, and the originally radical position that the only means of becoming liberated from rebirth is to achieve the same exalted status as the Buddha. (shrink)

J. T. Hooker argues that at Il. 24.649 πικερτομων must mean ‘taunting’ and, since ‘taunting’ makes no sense, that πικερτομων must have entered our Iliad at this point from a version of the Iliad slightly different from ours in which it did make sense. I wish to argue that πικερτομων has a meaning different from ‘taunting’, which makes good sense of this, and every other, context.

The predicate-argument approach, focused on perception, is compared with the ease-of-predication (or predicability) approach, focused on encyclopedic knowledge. The latter offers functional prediction and implementation in connectionist models. However, the two approaches characterise predicates in different ways. They thus resemble predicational cantilevers built out from opposite sides of cognition, with a gap that is yet to be bridged.

Examination of naturally occurring cases in which a person reports that a word is on the tip of his or her tongue has led several theorists to propose that an important role is played by blocking words whose intrusions hinder access to the correct targets. As yet, however, the blocking mechanism appears to have received little direct investigation experimentally. It was studied here by adapting the classic method of Brown and McNeill in which a person is presented with a definition (...) of a rare word and uses it to attempt to generate that target word. The adaptation that was made was to append a potential blocking word to the presentation of each definition. The potential blocking words were either phonologically related to the target or not, either semantically related to the target or not, and either rare or not. Only the first of these factors exerted a significant effect—more cases of tip of the tongue were experienced when the potential blocking word was phonologically related to the target than when it was not. This result suggests that the recall of a word on the basis of its meaning may proceed via an intermediate stage characterised by partial retrieval of its phonology. (shrink)

OBJECTIVES: To study the resuscitation preferences, choice of decision-maker, views on the seeking of patients' wishes and determinants of these of elderly hospital in-patients. DESIGN: Questionnaire administered on admission and prior to discharge. SETTING: Two acute geriatric medicine units (Southampton and Poole). PARTICIPANTS: Two hundred and fourteen consecutive consenting mentally competent patients admitted to hospital as emergencies. RESULTS: Resuscitation was wanted by 60%, particularly married and functionally independent patients and those who had not already considered it. Not wanted resuscitation was (...) associated with lack of social contacts. Sixty-seven per cent welcomed enquiry about their preferences and 78% wanted participation in decision, 43% as sole decision-maker. Wishing to choose oneself was associated with not wanting resuscitation, prior knowledge of it, and lack of a spouse. Patients' opinions remained stable during their admission. CONCLUSIONS: Discussion of resuscitation is practical on hospital admission without causing distress and the views expressed endure through the period of hospitalisation. Elderly patients' attitudes depend partly on personal health and social circumstances. This may assist doctors when patients are unable to participate themselves. (shrink)

A dilemma exists when a doctor is faced with a child or young person who refuses medically indicated treatment. The Gillick case has been interpreted by many to mean that a child of sufficient age and intelligence could validly consent or refuse consent to treatment. Recent decisions of the Court of Appeal on a child's refusal of medical treatment have clouded the issue and undermined the spirit of the Gillick decision and the Children Act 1989. It is now the case (...) that a child patient whose competence is in doubt will be found rational if he or she accepts the proposal to treat but may be found incompetent if he or she disagrees. Practitioners are alerted to the anomalies now exhibited by the law on the issue of children's consent and refusal. The impact of the decisions from the perspectives of medicine, ethics, and the law are examined. Practitioners should review each case of child care carefully and in cases of doubt seek legal advice. (shrink)

Two perspectives from which memories can be retrieved have been distinguished: field resembles the view from the first-person vantage point of original experience, whereas observer resembles the view from the third-person vantage point of a spectator. There is evidence that the incidences of the two types of perspective differ between at least two different cultural groups. It is hypothesised here that this is a special case of a more general relation between memory perspective and cultural individualism, such that field and (...) observer perspectives are more prevalent among people from, respectively, relatively individualist and relatively collectivist societies. Memory perspectives adopted by participants from a range of different countries were recorded, and were found to vary in the predicted manner. Regression analysis showed that the potential effects of three other cultural variables – uncertainty avoidance, masculinity and, to a lesser extent, power distance – were eclipsed by the influence of individualism, and the implications are discussed. (shrink)

A new conceptual framework, “energy justice,” provides a more comprehensive and, po­tentially, better way to assess and resolve energy-related dilemmas. This new framework of energy justice builds on four fundamental assumptions and consists of two key principles: a prohibitive principle which states that “energy systems must be designed and constructed in such a way that they do not unduly interfere with the ability of people to acquire those basic goods to which they are justly entitled,” and an affirmative principle which (...) states that “if any of the basic goods to which people are justly entitled can only be secured by means of energy services, then in that case there is also a derivative entitlement to the energy services.” These two principles are premised on the notion that energy serves as a material prerequisite for many of the basic goods to which people are entitled. They also recognize that the externalities associated with energy systems often interfere with the enjoyment of such fundamental goods as security and welfare. They acknowledge that the structuring of energy systems has profound ramifications for human societies, providing historically unprecedented benefits for some, and taking from others the possibility of living a life of basic human dignity. (shrink)

Despite its short life and the nonexistence of either troops or strong authority, the League of Nations did manage to generate positive developments in the establishment of international protection.

The possibility that two forms of asymmetry underlie handedness is considered. Corballis has proposed that right-handedness developed when gesture encountered lateralized vocalization but may have been superimposed on a preexisting two-thirds dominance. Evidence is reviewed here which suggests that the baseline asymmetry is even more substantial than this, with possible implications for brain anatomy and genetic theories of handedness.