This article portrays the unique aspects of ethics education in a multicultural, multireligious and conflict-based atmosphere among Jewish and Arab nursing students in Jerusalem, Israel. It discusses the principles and the methods used for rising above this tension and dealing with this complicated situation, based on Yoder's `bridging' method. An example is used of Jewish and Arab students together implementing two projects in 2008, when the faculty decided to co-operate with communities in East Jerusalem, the Arab side of the city. (...) The students took it upon themselves to chaperon the teachers who came to watch them at work, translate, and facilitate interaction with a guarded and suspicious community. This approach could also be relevant to less extreme conditions in any inter-religious environment when trying to produce graduates with a strong ethical awareness. (shrink)

This book presents empirical studies of the rise, expansion, and influence of scientific discourse and organization throughout the world, over the past century. Using quantitative cross-national data, it shows the impact of this scientized world polity on national societies. It examines how this world scientific system and national reflections of it have influenced a wide variety of institutional spheres—the economy, political systems, human rights, environmentalism, and organizational reforms. The authors argue that the triumph of science across social domains and around (...) the world is due to its institutionalized cultural authority rather than to its instrumental utility for societies or for their dominant elites. Thus, following the Stanford approach to institutional theory in sociology, the book emphasizes the symbolic or religious role science plays in the modern world. (shrink)

Hymen construction and nontherapeutic male circumcision are medical nonindicated interventions that give rise to specific ethical concerns. In Europe, hymen construction is generally more contested among medical professionals than male circumcision. Yet, from a standard biomedical framework, guided by the principles of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice, circumcision of boys is, as this article explains, more problematic than hymen construction. While there is a growing debate on the acceptability of infant circumcision, in the case of competent minors and adults the (...) surgery is not questioned. In the case of hymenoplasty, usually requested by a competent patient, it is recommended to only perform the operation after extensive counseling and if there are compelling conditions. The article further explores why attitudes of medical professionals toward both surgeries diverge and seeks to explain how this is largely informed by gendered and socio-cultural understandings. The arti... (shrink)

The problematic issues connected to post-truth communication emerged in all their social relevance after the victory of Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016. Fake news, echo chambers, filter bubbles, and a crisis of experts are some of the phenomena of this epoch of digital revolution that everyone is forced to deal with on daily basis. Public media echoed the plea for a return to a connection between reality, truth, and communication that has been advocated for by philosophy and communication studies (...) since the beginning of the century. However, the strategy for effecting this return is not clear. The paper presents two of the most common strategies employed by practitioners of communication in the newsrooms: reliance on a new form of positivism and the necessity of inculcating critical media literacy into the general population. Concluding that both proposals are inadequate, the paper proposes a rich, relational realism stemming from Peirce’s semiotic and metaphysical studies. (shrink)

Not long after his arrival in the south-central highlands of Papua New Guinea, the British missionary John Henry Holmes was awoken in the early hours of the morning by a strange cry that issued, it...

In the current study of metaphor it is commonly assumed that during a meta­phorical reading both an impression of dissimilarity and an impression of similarity are created in the reader’s mind. These separate impressions exist simultaneously and each of them is considered to have linear relations with the metaphor’s aptness without either coming at the expense of the other. Thus far this assumption has never received any satisfactory theoretical justification. In this paper I discuss the problem of the simultaneous existence (...) of similarity and dissimilarity in the reader’s awareness when engaged in metaphor comprehension. I examine the methods for resolving this pro­blem, point out the shortcomings of the suggested solution and present an alternative solution. My solution uses a well-known distinction in the field of visual perception, that of global similarity versus dimensional similarity, and applies it to metaphor comprehension. While doing so I also try to supply a novel perspective on the process of metaphor comprehension. (shrink)

Aristotle's explanation of what is said ‘of every’ and ‘of none’ has been interpreted either as involving individuals, or as regarding exclusively universal terms. I claim that Alexander of Aphrodisias endorsed this latter interpretation of the dictum de omni et de nullo. This interpretation affects our understanding of Alexander's syllogistic: as a matter of fact, Alexander maintained that the dictum de omni et de nullo is one of the core principles of syllogistic.

In recent years, facial difference is increasingly on the public and academic agenda. This is evidenced by the growing public presence of individuals with an atypical face, and the simultaneous emergence of research investigating the issues associated with facial variance. The scholarship on facial difference approaches this topic either through a medical and rehabilitation perspective, or a psycho-social one. However, having a different face also encompasses an embodied dimension. In this paper, we explore this embodied dimension by interpreting the stories (...) of individuals with facial limb absence against the background of phenomenological theories of the body, illness and disability. Our findings suggest that the atypical face disrupts these individuals’ engagement with everyday projects when it gives rise to disruptive perceptions, sensations, and observations. The face then ceases to be the absent background to perception, and becomes foregrounded in awareness. The disruptions evoked by facial difference call for adjustments: as they come to terms with their altered face, the participants in our study gradually develop various new bodily habits that re-establish their face’s absence, or relate to its disruptive presence. It is through these emergent habits that facial difference comes to be embodied. By analyzing the everyday experiences of individuals with facial limb absence, this article provides a much-needed exploration of the embodied aspects of facial difference. It also exemplifies how a phenomenological account of illness and disability can do justice both to the impairments and appearance issues associated with atypical embodiment. (shrink)

According to Philoponus, the activity of drawing syllogisms is a dynamic operation. Following the classical idea that actions are specified by their objects and habitual powers by their actions, Philoponus concludes that only a dynamic power can elicit the act of syllogizing. This power is identified with discursive reasoning (dianoia). Imagination, on the contrary, is a static power, that cannot elicit that particular motion of drawing a syllogistic inference. The issue, however, is not entirely uncontroversial, because Ammonius maintains that sophistical (...) syllogisms can only be formed by imagination, since they involve “empty concepts” as terms and only imagination can form such concepts. In this paper I will reconstruct Philoponus’ and Ammonius’ theories about the “activity” of syllogizing, and I shall explain how Philoponus can deal with sophistical syllogisms in a consistent way. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas maintained that God foreknows future contingent events and that his foreknowledge does not entail that they are necessarily the case. More specifically, he stated that if God knows a future contingent event, this future contingent event will be necessarily the case de sensu composito, but not de sensu diviso. After emphasizing the unified nature of Aquinas’ notion of necessity, we propose an interpretation of his theses by restating them within the framework of non-normal modal logics. In this framework, (...) the K-axiom does not hold, i.e. the necessity operator does not distribute over the material implication. Moreover, assuming that Aquinas rejected the K-axiom is not only consistent, but also leads to a logical framework that allows us to understand other theses maintained by the Doctor Angelicus. In particular, we argue that Aquinas’ remarks on the principle of non-contradiction rest on an impossible worlds semantics for non-normal modal logics. (shrink)

Op 4 mei 2011 overleed Koen Raes. Hij was verbonden aan de Vakgroep grondslagen en geschiedenis van het recht van de Universiteit Gent en speelde decennia lang als publieke intellectueel en ethicus een belangrijke rol in maatschappelijke en ethische debatten in Vlaanderen, België, Nederland, maar ook daarbuiten. In dit boek is een brede selectie van ingeleide teksten van hem opgenomen. Het verschijnt parallel met een (dubbel)nummer van het tijdschrift 'Ethiek en Maatschappij' - een tijdschrift door Koen Raes in 1998 opgericht (...) en waarvan hij tot recent ook de gedreven hoofdredacteur van was. Uit de hier door Gily Coene verzamelde teksten en uit de inleidingen erop blijkt overduidelijk hoe scherp en helder Koen Raes complexe maatschappelijk-ethische problemen en thema's in kaart kon brengen en hier een gefundeerde positie over kon ontwikkelen. (shrink)

Prosthetic devices that replace an absent body part are generally considered to be either cosmetic or functional. Functional prostheses aim to restore (some degree of) lost physical functioning. Cosmetic prostheses attempt to restore a “normal” appearance to bodies that lack (one or more) limbs by emulating the absent body part’s looks. In this article, we investigate how cosmetic prostheses establish a normal appearance by drawing on the stories of the users of a specific type of artificial limb: the facial prosthesis. (...) Given that prostheses are first and foremost devices worn upon the body, such an analysis requires an understanding of the ways in which bodies and technologies interact. We thus interpret users’ stories by critically engaging with the work of disability researcher and Actor-Network theorist Myriam Winance, as well as with the postphenomenological scholarship of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek. Using this framework, we explore users’ attempts to achieve a proper fit between their faces and their prostheses, the technological transparency such a fit enables, and the ways in which transparency mediates users’ everyday exchanges with others. We conclude that a normal appearance, when it is achieved by means of prosthetics, enables the device’s user to navigate a precarious social environment as they encounter and interact with others in public. (shrink)

Baumard's perspective asserts that “opportunity is the mother of innovation,” in contrast to the adage ascribing this role to necessity. Drawing on behavioral ecology and cognition, we propose that both extremes – affluence and scarcity – can drive innovation. We suggest that the types of innovations at these two extremes differ and that both rely on mechanisms operating on different time scales.

According to both Jaakko Hintikka and Simo Knuuttila, Aquinas’ third way to demonstrate that God exists presupposes the acceptance of the principle of plenitude, i.e., of the claim that all possibilities are realized at some time. Aquinas, however, maintained elsewhere that not all possibilities are always realized, and the coherence of his philosophical project may be called into question if one were to accept Hintikka’s and Knuuttila’s reading of the third way. In this paper, I argue that it is difficult (...) to present the third way without invoking the principle of plenitude in Hintikka’s formulation. The corollary of this claim is that third way cannot be a demonstration within the philosophical system outlined by Aquinas, despite his claim to the contrary. Against the backdrop of this exegetical discussion, it is possible to rephrase Aquinas’ third way as a probabilistic argument that shows that God’s existence is highly likely, although not necessarily proven. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Aquinas’s commentary on a text of Aristotle in which the type of order between substance and accidents is discussed. I claim that Aquinas maintains that there cannot be any reference to sensibility, despite any prima facie interpretation of Aristotle’s texts, according to which it could be thought that substance is temporally prior to accidents and, hence, that we must presuppose a perceivable change in the world on the basis of which it is possible to consider (...) something temporally prior to something else. This interpretation – which is possible on the basis of Aristotle’s texts – would be a misinterpretation, according to Aquinas. Aquinas’s assumption is philosophically worthwhile because it confi rms that every metaphysical proposition must abstract from sensibility. (shrink)

To better understand the available publications addressing ethical issues in rural health care we sought to identify the ethics literature that specifically focuses on rural America. We wanted to determine the extent to which the rural ethics literature was distributed between general commentaries, descriptive summaries of research, and original research publications. We identified 55 publications that specifically and substantively addressed rural health care ethics, published between 1966 and 2004. Only 7 (13%) of these publications were original research articles while (12) (...) 22% were descriptive summaries of research and 36 (65%) were general commentaries. The majority of publications examined (55%) were clinically focused while 27% addressed organizational ethics and 18% addressed ethical ramifications of rural health care policy at a national or community level. Our findings indicate that there are a limited number of publications focusing on rural health care ethics, suggesting a need for scholars and researchers to more rigorously address rural ethics issues. (shrink)

Both W.D. Ross's and J. Brunschwig's editions of Aristotle's Topics contain the following passage: ἔτι εἰ τοῦ αὐτοῦ τινος τὸ μὲν μᾶλλον τὸ δὲ ἧττον τοιοῦτο· καὶ εἰ τὸ μὲν τοιούτου μᾶλλον τοιοῦτο, τὸ δὲ μὴ τοιούτου, δῆλον ὅτι τὸ πϱῶτον μᾶλλον τοιοῦτο. The passage is translated in the revised Oxford translation as follows: ‘Moreover, if in any character one thing exceeds and another falls short of the same standard; also, if the one exceeds something which possesses the character, while (...) the other exceeds something which does not, then clearly the first thing exhibits that character in a greater degree’. (shrink)

This dissertation includes an introduction, five main chapters, and a conclusion. In the chapter “The Definition of Change”, I expound Aquinas’ account of change. I maintain that Aquinas’ account is meant to describe both spiritual and material changes. Hence, the hylomorphic account of change as the passage from form-less matter to enformed matter is unable to describe all changes. Contrary to Brower, I suggest that Aquinas’ favorite model involves a passage from potentiality to actuality. In addition, I state that ‘change’ (...) is identical to the second potentiality/first actuality of a process that includes three steps, a first potentiality, a second potentiality, and a second actuality. In the chapter on “Aquinas, Presentism, and Adverbialism”, I analyze the semantics of propositions that describe changing processes. I maintain that Aquinas subscribed to the view that past and future tense statements can have a truth-value. Chapter 4 is devoted to the so-called principle of plenitude, i.e. the thesis that all possibilities are realized at some point in the future. Aquinas is believed to have subscribed to the principle, whereas Aristotle’s texts are much more disputed. In this chapter, I offer a new interpretation, according to which Aristotle accepted a restricted version of the principle of plenitude, but Aquinas rejected the principle in all its formulations. In chapter 5 “Aquinas on Future Contingents”, I expound Aquinas’ theory of future contingents events. In this chapter, I make two claims. I state that Aquinas’ theory entails that future events do not exist, according to the ‘actual’ sense of existence. My second claim is about the logic of future contingents. I claim that Aquinas’ argument is logically sound, but presupposes that the so-called K-formula is not a tautology of Aquinas’ modal system. In chapter 6 I expound Aquinas’ definition of time. I maintain that Aquinas’ definition is not circular and time is distinct in both definition and in essendo from change. I conclude by stating that time has extra-mental existence. (shrink)

In his paper “Aquinas, Geach, and Existence”, D. Costa maintains that Aquinas’ solution to the puzzle of future contingent events entails that future contingent entities already exist. This is tantamount to state that Aquinas endorsed a form of eternalism, since he maintained that past, present and future timelessly exist in God’s sight. I object that Aquinas’ texts are also compatible with another reading. In any statement of the form “S will be P”, the verb “will be” simply states the truth (...) of the predicative link between S and P, not the existence of either S or P. In other words, I take the verb “to be” occurring in sentences describing future events as having the meaning of the “esse ut verum”. (shrink)

This article examines the contradictions inherent in blind women’s appearance management. Based on an anthropological analysis of interviews with 40 blind women in Israel, the article argues that while serving as a valuable tool within stigma management, appearance management operates simultaneously as a site of rigorous discipline of the body in an effort to comply with feminine visual norms, and as a vehicle for the expression and reception of sensory pleasure. It argues for the significant role of blind women’s appearance (...) in negotiating normalcy and rejecting the normative, stigmatizing script written for them as disabled-blind-women. By studying the role of appearance in the lives of women who do not rely on sight as a central mode of perception, the article addresses the complicated position of blind women in visual culture and challenges the traditional ocular focus of the study of feminine identity and gender performance. (shrink)

In this paper I compare Philoponus’s account of the laws of conversion for categorical and modal propositions with Alexander’s exposition of the same topic. I argue that Philoponus’s main source was Alexander’s commentary on Aristotle’s Prior Analytics and that Philoponus had no access to independent sources to reconstruct Theophrastus’s proof for the conversion of universal negative propositions. I suggest that the different solutions that Alexander and Philoponus offer to the puzzles of the doctrine of the laws of conversion depend on (...) the two commentators’ different exegetical strategies. Alexander tries to solve the puzzles by means of doctrines, which Aristotle expounded elsewhere. Philoponus instead interprets Aristotle’s passage as implying a hierarchy among propositions - a doctrine which is not explicitly present in Aristotle’s text. (shrink)

Syllogism is a form of logical argument allowing one to deduce a consistent conclusion based on a pair of premises having a common term. Although Aristotle was the first to conceive and develop this way of reasoning, he left open a lot of conceptual space for further modifications, improvements and systematizations with regards to his original syllogistic theory. From its creation until modern times, syllogism has remained a powerful and compelling device of deduction and argument, used by a variety of (...) figures and assuming a variety of forms throughout history. The Aftermath of Syllogism investigates the key developments in the history of this peculiar pattern of inference, from Avicenna to Hegel. Taking as its focus the longue durée of development between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, this book looks at the huge reworking scientific syllogism underwent over the centuries, as some of the finest philosophical minds brought it to an unprecedented height of logical sharpness and sophistication. Bringing together a group of major international experts in the Aristotelian tradition, The Aftermath of Syllogism provides a detailed, up to date and critical evaluation of the history of syllogistic deduction. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Physics VIII, 5, 256b8-13, Aristotle maintains that it is impossible that there is no motion, because he proved earlier on that it is necessary that there is always motion. In Physics VIII, 1, 251b23-28, Aristotle said that it is necessary that if time is eternal, then motion is also eternal. In Physics VIII, 5, 256b8-13, Aristotle speaks on the contrary about the necessity of eternal motion. In this paper, we show that the argument expounded in Physics VIII, 1, 251b23-28 (...) entails that eternal motion is also necessary de sensu diviso. (shrink)