The article provides an overview of arts-based research within social work and general healthcare practice in Canada, and how it can be used to uncover racism within vulnerable populations, particularly youth, women, immigrants and refugees, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex community, and Indigenous peoples. This is a general review of the literature. A literature search was conducted using the University of Western Ontario’s Summons database, with coverage from January 2000 to February 2019. Data exploring participant experiences, personal (...) identity, voice, and invisible powers were extracted, and analyzed using a critical race lens to examine the intersection of societal and cultural practice with race and power.Results indicate that ABR can support therapeutic recovery from oppression by enhancing self-expression of feelings and thoughts, and affording participants the agency to reclaim and reframe their personal narrative. ABR can further generate a sense of community by creating connections between participants with similar oppressions to overcome disconnection and marginalization. Within a broader community context, ABR permits the sharing of stories and insights with others, which can generate dialogue on important social issues to expose areas of social inequity and oppression alongside potential solutions for transformative social action. This dialogue can also extend to discussions with policy makers on the impact of social inequities to guide recommendations that address system gaps for broader community-level change. The paper concludes that ABR can move beyond merely reflecting on social conditions toward actively addressing them by promoting sustainable social change. The voices expressed through ABR illustrate possible solutions to overcome racism through inclusive social practice, deconstruction of the racial status quo, and movement toward an equitable distribution of power. (shrink)

The question examined in this study is not merely how a Nietzschean critique of law would look had Nietzsche ever applied his genealogical method to the question of law, but also what positive function Nietzschean philosophy may ascribe to law, and how law must then be transformed. The methodological parable imagines a “post-genealogy” or “pot-ressentiment” phase of the human condition, akin to the Marxist “post-revolutionary” phase: how would law look for the person of power - overman or otherwise - who (...) needs to live among others? How is normativity possible - what are its forms and functions - in a social world that has undergone a reevaluation of all values? The study traces three possible models for conceptualizing law in Nietzschean terms, each requiring a radical shift from traditional (in different contexts: liberal, Christian, bourgeois) conceptions. The first one is play: law as affirming and embracing the essence of the Dionysian, which is perpetual becoming. Play requires us to let go of law's role as the curtailer of arbitrariness. An integral part of the Nietzschean program, it requires a radical reevaluation: not just law's content is overcome, nor merely its bourgeois forms (in Pashukanis' critical terms), but its “internal” or “inherent” values of certitude and stability are overcome as well. The model I offer for play is not Zarathustra's dicethrow but Borges' The Lottery in Babylon. The second model is that of resistance, framed by Nietzsche's analysis of power and Deleuze's distinction between active and reactive forces. The insight here is that power requires resistance, and it is law's primary function to empower the other in order to invest value in meeting and confronting her; thus the monism of the will to power not only does not do away with normativity in the public sphere but actually requires it - but for goals opposite to those of liberalism. Resistance is linked to the third model, fashioned after Nietzsche's model of education: here, law performs not as a socializing agent but rather as a “liberator” of authenticity. Its function is analogous to that of a mentor whose role is to ultimately encourage the pupil into coming into her own will, shedding ressentiment and bad conscience in an active, i.e. non-conscious way; in its relation to consciousness it is the opposite of psychoanalysis. A fourth consideration is then offered, the role of normativity in self-overcoming, or self-legislating; namely, how does normativity figure in the will to power's most significant challenge. While all these models work from an interpretation of the will to power as becoming, the last two are especially dependent on the active-reactive distinction. The cornerstone is not to mix up power with representations of power; to realize that the case is not the will that desires power (as an object of desire, this would necessarily involve a representation of power) but power that wills becoming. In dealing with this metaphysical question I expound on a similar crucial interpretation, originally offered by Deleuze; however, I break off from Deleuze's claim that the will to power has nothing to do with any notion of struggle. If this discussion of the will to power is missed , or if it is wrong, the main argument of this article can not hold. Finally, I use this interpretation of the will to power to solve Kafka's riddle in The Trial: a necessary move once one realizes that, in the ethical history of western culture, Kafka's parable of the seeker of the law before its closed gates continues a sequence that began with Plato's fable of the cave and continued with Zarathustra's cave parable. I add three points that may be termed methodological or contextual. The first is positioning Nietzsche's limited discussion of law and politics as a derivative of his metaphysics of the will and treatment of moral psychology, not as an independent topic to be searched and indexed in some textual corpus. The second is to understand the question of normativity in its particularly Nietzschean sense, i.e. “what is X to me/to the overman?”, and not in the Kantian sense of uncovering the conditions that entail any synthetic, a-priori sentence (such as normative ones). The last comment places the Nietzschean project in a larger pattern that defined radical thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and whose other cases are Marx and Freud: a new metaphysics (will to power/materialism/id) that uncovers a state of bondage, psychological and material, in which law plays a pivotal role in its function of reinforcer and supplier of a legitimizing language (respectively, of ressentiment, of the relations of production, of Oedipus and the bourgeois family); and finally radical, yet partial ways of overcoming bondage that are not mutually translatable - genealogy, revolution, psychoanalysis. (shrink)

In True Detective, the character of Rust Cohle is remarkable in giving voice to pessimism. Cohle says: "Time is a flat circle". This is Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence, as depicted in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cohle expresses this idea in a pessimistic mood and it is meant to magnify the absurdity of life by declaring its endless repetition. Schopenhauer was an early influence on Nietzsche, and they agreed on certain basic things, including the primacy of (...) a driving will, which generates perpetual conflict with no ultimate resolution and no salvation. Nietzsche's book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, provides a dramatic narrative depicting the task of life‐affirmation in the face of eternal recurrence. The portrayal of eternal recurrence in True Detective is not in the spirit of Nietzsche's conception. It is more akin to Schopenhauer's response. Nietzsche finds a way to overcome pessimism by affirming life because of its tragic limits. (shrink)

John Rawls’s political liberalism and its ideal of public reason are tremendously influential in contemporary political philosophy and in constitutional law as well. Many, perhaps even most, liberals are Rawlsians of one stripe or another. This is problematic, because most liberals also support the redefinition of civil marriage to include same-sex unions, and as I show, Rawls’s political liberalism actually prohibits same- sex marriage. Recently in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, however, California’s northern federal district court reinterpreted the traditional rational basis review (...) in terms of liberal neutrality akin to Rawls’s “public reason,” and overturned Proposition 8 and established same-sex marriage. (This reinterpretation was amplified in the 9th Circuit Court’s decision upholding the district court on appeal in Perry v. Brown.) But on its own grounds Perry should have drawn the opposite conclusion. This is because all the available arguments for recognizing same-sex unions as civil marriages stem from controversial comprehensive doctrines about the good, and this violates the ideal of public reason; yet there remains a publicly reasonable argument for traditional marriage, which I sketch here. In the course of my argument I develop Rawls’s politically liberal account of the family by drawing upon work by J. David Velleman and H. L. A. Hart, and discuss the implications of this account for political theory and constitutional law. (shrink)

This study focuses on why some companies in developing countries go beyond environmental regulations when implementing their corporate environmental social responsibilities or citizenship behavior. Drawing mainly upon the new institutional theory, this study develops a conceptual framework to explain three institutional factors: companies’ market orientations, industrial characteristics, and corporate identities. Accordingly, we suggest that companies from developing countries that are oriented to markets in developed countries, operate in highly concentrated industries, and have missionary identities adopt corporate environmental citizenship behavior by (...) going beyond environmental regulations. The study also discusses the theoretical, policy, and managerial implications of the conceptual framework. (shrink)

The general attitude towards Arthur Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is rather fiercely critical and at times even tendentious. It seems that the figure of Schopenhauer as an irredeemably flawed, stubborn, and contradictory philosopher serves as a leitmotiv among scholars. Schopenhauer’s identification of the thing-in-itself with the will continues to be a thorny puzzle in the secondary literature, and it presents perhaps the greatest challenge to Schopenhauer scholars. Schopenhauer borrows the term ‘thing-in-itself’ from Immanuel Kant, who uses it to refer to a reality (...) that is distinct from what appears to us, and hence unknowable. Despite the fact that several interpretations have been offered to make sense of Schopenhauer’s identification of the thing-in-itself with the will, there appears to be no consensus about how to interpret this identification as well as his understanding of the term ‘thing-in-itself’. Unlike the other interpretations, the interpretation that I offer here distinguishes between three distinct and mutually incompatible views that Schopenhauer formulates about the thing-in-itself. I argue that it is not only difficult to give a coherent, consistent account of Schopenhauer’s position, but also not worth trying, because such an endeavor comes at the cost of ignoring the textual richness and depth of thought that Schopenhauer’s works offer. (shrink)

Nietzsche is known for his penetrating critique of Mitleid. He seems to be critical of all compassion but at times also seems to praise a different form of compassion, which he refers to as “our compassion” and contrasts it with “your compassion”. Some commentators have interpreted this to mean that Nietzsche’s criticism is not as unconditional as it may seem – that he does not condemn compassion entirely. I disagree and contend that even though Nietzsche appears to speak favorably of (...) some forms of compassion, he regards the nature of all compassion to be fundamentally bad. Furthermore, I suggest that Nietzsche’s discussion on different forms of compassion have significant implications for achieving greatness and meaning in life. More specifically, I argue that, for Nietzsche, “our compassion,” however regrettable qua compassion it is, may give occasion for a rare and peculiar insight into “co-suffering” with others, which in turn results in overcoming compassion entirely. I also argue that although Nietzsche objects to compassion, he approves of a form of what feminist theorists might now call “anticipatory empathy.” Even though a large body of literature has evolved over Nietzsche’s critical evaluation of compassion, his understanding of a non-compassionate response to suffering is, in my view, rather overlooked and should receive more attention. (shrink)

La autora presenta una critica a la concepcion clasica de los sentidos asumida por la mayoria de autores naturalistas que pretenden explicar el contenido mental. Esta crítica se basa en datos neurobiologicos sobre los sentidos que apuntan a que estos no parecen describir caracteristicas objetivas del mundo, sino que actuan de forma ʼnarcisita', es decir, representan informacion en funcion de los intereses concretos del organismo.El articulo se encuentra también en: Bechtel, et al., Philosophy and the Neuroscience.

Throughout the text, fundamental questions concerning the nature of visual perception are addressed.

Nietzsche is not known for his theory of empathy. A quick skimming of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on empathy demonstrates this. Arthur Schopenhauer, Robert Vischer, and Theodor Lipps are among those whose views are considered representative, but Nietzsche has been simply forgotten in discussion of empathy. Nietzsche’s theory of empathy has not yet aroused sufficient interest among commentators. I believe that his views on this subject merit careful consideration. Nietzsche scholars have been interested in his naturalistic accounts of (...) other phenomena, but there seems to be relatively limited interest in his naturalistic account of a phenomenon that is so central to his disagreement with Schopenhauer, namely, empathic concern for others. This is surprising because Nietzsche makes a valuable contribution; he has views more in keeping with contemporary theories of empathy than others of his time. My goal here is to fill in this gap in the scholarship and provide the first thorough analysis of Nietzsche’s theory of empathy, which appears most clearly in Dawn. (shrink)

I argue against a prevailing interpretation of Schopenhauer’s account of inner awareness and world-understanding. Because scholars have typically taken on board the assumption that inner awareness is non-representational, they have concerned themselves in the main with how to transfer this immediate cognition of will in ourselves and apply it to our understanding of the world–as–representation. Some scholars propose that the relation of the world-as-will to the world-as-representation is to be understood in figurative or metaphorical terms. I disagree because, for Schopenhauer, (...) inner awareness reveals a genuine philosophical truth. Some scholars also suggest that it is only via analogical transference that one can interpret the world as having the same inner nature as oneself. I disagree and point out the downside of this suggestion. I use both textual evidence and general philosophical considerations to demonstrate that inner awareness, for Schopenhauer, has a representational dimension. Overlooking this point has led scholars to misconstrue how inner awareness relates to world-understanding. I provide an alternative interpretation against figurative and analogical readings. I propose that, for Schopenhauer, we cognize partially a priori that all things are merely different expressions of the same activity that we are acquainted with in inner awareness. (shrink)

Anonymized reflection was employed as an innovative way of teaching ethics in order to enhance students' ability in ethical decision making during a `Care of the Dying Patient and Family' module. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from the first two student cohorts who experienced anonymized reflection ( n = 24). The themes identified were the richness and relevance of scenarios, small-group work and a team approach to teaching. Students indicated that they preferred this style of teaching. This finding (...) was verified by a postal questionnaire conducted four months later. The conclusions drawn from this study suggest that using anonymized reflection is an effective method for teaching ethics to nurses and indicates that learning about ethical issues in this way reduces uncertainties. (shrink)

An essential aspect of forming representations of social groups is to recognize socially relevant attributes licensed by the group membership. Because knowledge of cultural practices tends to be transmitted through social contact within social groups, it is one of the fundamental attributes shared among members of a social group. Two experiments explored whether 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds selectively attribute shared cultural knowledge on the basis of group membership of agents. Using novel social groups, children were introduced to one target agent and (...) two other agents, one of which belonged to the same group as the target and one belonged to a different group. Children were then asked who would know or like same things as the target agent. The results showed that children expect group members to know the same songs, whereas they do not necessarily expect them to like the same songs or know the same generic facts. These findings suggest that children are remarkably selective in the attributions they make based on social group membership and from early on, they expect social group membership and cultural knowledge to be closely linked. (shrink)

This article examines ways in which dancers, dancing and choreography came to embody ideas of American identity and power after the Second World War. It does this through a study of the work of ballet choreographer George Balanchine. I focus on an analysis of one particular ballet, The Four Temperaments(1946), which proved to be a defining work in Balanchine's career. Balanchine arrived in New York from Europe in 1934 and spent the next decade as an itinerant choreographer whose ballets were (...) viewed as part of a decadent Franco-Russian tradition. However, after the close of the war, Balanchine's reputation underwent an enormous shift. He came to be considered the creator of an American balletic style and was hailed by many as the country's greatest choreographer. Balanchine's rise coincided with America's assumption of world leadership and the development of the Cold War. I show how a combination of writing and dancing produced Balanchine's choreography, his dancers and, indeed, Balanchine himself, as the embodiment of uniquely American attributes. I argue that this corporeal politics helped meet American ideological goals at home and abroad. (shrink)

_A renowned scholar’s reflections on the romantic period, its disparate participants, and our unacknowledged debt to them_ With his usual wit and élan, esteemed historian Peter Gay enters the contentious, long-standing debates over the romantic period. Here, in this concise and inviting volume, he reformulates the definition of romanticism and provides a fresh account of the immense achievements of romantic writers and artists in all media. Gay’s scope is wide, his insights sharp. He takes on the recurring questions about how (...) to interpret romantic figures and their works. Who qualifies to be a romantic? What ties together romantic figures who practice in different countries, employ different media, even live in different centuries? How is modernism indebted to romanticism, if at all? Guiding readers through the history of the romantic movement across Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland, Gay argues that the best way to conceptualize romanticism is to accept its complicated nature and acknowledge that there is no “single basket” to contain it. Gay conceives of romantics in “families,” whose individual members share fundamental values but retain unique qualities. He concludes by demonstrating that romanticism extends well into the twentieth century, where its deep and lasting impact may be measured in the work of writers such as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. (shrink)

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett presents the Multiple Drafts Theory of consciousness, a very brief, largely empirical theory of brain function. From these premises, he draws a number of quite radical conclusions—for example, the conclusion that conscious events have no determinate time of occurrence. The problem, as many readers have pointed out, is that there is little discernible route from the empirical premises to the philosophical conclusions. In this article, I try to reconstruct Dennett's argument, providing both the philosophical views (...) behind the empirical premises, and the hidden empirical arguments behind the derivation of the philosophical conclusions. (shrink)

The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to expose Friedrich Nietzsche’s critically neglected account of empathic concern. In what follows, I will briefly present the main ideas and purpose of the project, and include necessary background. -/- Since a significant portion of Nietzsche’s work on moral psychology and ethics is directed toward naturalizing and conceptually redefining the metaphysical implications of Arthur Schopenhauer’s account of compassion, I begin by critically examining Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. At its simplest, Schopenhauer’s narrative goes as follows: the (...) phenomenal world is determined and driven by a metaphysical striving and yearning (more clearly, a will-to-live) that can never be satisfied. We have access to this underlying reality of existence, i.e., the thing-in-itself, subjectively, in the inner awareness which we have of our own experience of willing. -/- Unfortunately, the subtleties and nuances of Schopenhauer’s understanding of inner awareness and its centrality within his overall oeuvre have generally been overlooked or underappreciated by scholars. I suspect that the main reason for this problem is that there does not seem to be an adequate account of the relation between representation and willing in Schopenhauer’s system. I offer an in-depth analysis of Schopenhauer’s understanding of inner awareness, as well as demonstrate its significance as the essential precursor to self-knowledge and world-understanding. -/- The thing-in-itself, a term Schopenhauer borrows from Immanuel Kant, signifies a fundamental reality that underlies the apparent diversity and change in the world, a reality that is distinct from what is merely temporal or changeable. Schopenhauer’s identification of the thing-in-itself with the will has been deeply problematic and puzzling to commentators, because willing and striving is temporal, and no temporal phenomenon can be identical to the thing-in-itself. I distinguish between three distinct views that Schopenhauer formulates about the thing-in-itself, and suggest to understand these three accounts as contrasting but not contradictory views, in other words as different perspectives on the same reality. -/- Next, I examine the theory of empathy that Nietzsche presents in his book, Daybreak, as an alternative to Schopenhauer’s account of compassion, which is solely based on his metaphysics of the will. For Schopenhauer, compassion is associated with an instinctual recognition that beneath our apparent separateness as individuals, we are in fact the expression of the same metaphysical will. Nietzsche moves away from this metaphysical conception and calls, instead, for a naturalistic account in which empathy relies on a sense of psychological closeness and perceived similarity to others, which then results in a feeling of oneness between individuals. Yet, for Nietzsche, this feeling of oneness manifests itself as a sense of being in solidarity with others who share similar experiences, while still recognizing one another’s numerical distinctiveness. -/- Finally, I examine Nietzsche’s assessment of the value of compassion. Nietzsche seems to be critical of all compassion but at times also seems to praise a different form of compassion, which he refers to as ‘our compassion’ and contrasts it with ‘your compassion’. Some commentators have interpreted this to mean that Nietzsche’s criticism is not as unconditional as it may seem–that he does not condemn compassion entirely. I disagree and contend that even though Nietzsche appears to speak favorably of some forms of compassion, he regards all compassion as fundamentally bad. I argue that, for Nietzsche, ‘our compassion’, however regrettable qua compassion it is, may give occasion for a rare and peculiar insight into ‘co-suffering’ with others, which in turn results in overcoming compassion entirely. (shrink)

The chapter summarizes the discussions on perception between Churchland, Ramachandran, and Dennett. The arguments focus on a central issue—the relationship between the actual visual experience and one's internal neural representations. A detailed discourse on Dennett's Theory of Consciousness is provided, with particular focus on his explanations on the phenomenon of “filling in.” The chapter points out several weaknesses in Dennett's work, arising from his attempt to reconcile essentially divergent beliefs on philosophy as it relates to persons and science as it (...) relates to “sub-personal” processing. Three concerns are identified: first, the supposed transparency of content and a person's capacity to make mistakes in describing one's own visual experience must be reconciled; second, an explanation on the similarity of our neurological experiences with both abstract and detailed veridical content must be given; and third, computational content must be provided to support his claim of content being transparent to consciousness. (shrink)

Nigerian Pidgin is a popular informal communicative code in Nigerian social, economic and political experience. It is sometimes spoken in formal situations in the hospital setting when participants find it pragmatically convenient. Despite its communicative significance, little research has been carried out on the use of Pidgin in conversational interactions in Nigerian hospitals, a gap this study fills by investigating how Pidgin is used in constructing emotions relating to social and medical conditions in hospitals. Seventy five interactions between doctors and (...) clients in Nigerian Pidgin were sampled; the data analysis was based centrally on relevance theory. Nigerian Pidgin evokes negative and positive emotions. Negative emotions manifest as pain and fear, while positive emotions appear as excitement and relief. Doctors and clients gain access to each other’s intentions through their shared knowledge of Pidgin, their co-construction of ailments, and their contextually based local interactional resources. They thus negotiate emotions as cue-dependent variables that are steered with the help of cognitive processes. (shrink)