Case study: while on placement at a mental health day centre I was assigned to act as key-worker to Mr X, a working-class white man in his early 40s who has been diagnosed with several psychiatric disorders. Mr X also experiences poor physical health. Mr X has been diagnosed as ?having? obsessive compulsive disorder, major depressive disorder, anger management disorder, Tourette's syndrome and paranoia. He has also been diagnosed with fibromyalgia. For all these, he daily takes a powerful cocktail of (...) anti-depressants, mood-stabilizers, anti-psychotics and pain killers. From his file I noted that he had been discharged from the local community psychiatric team, so he no longer had regular and unproblematic access to either a psychiatrist or social worker. He had been receiving anger management therapy (AMT), but his attendance had been sporadic. Mr X had, he claimed, no real friends, or, as he put it, ?just mere acquaintances?. Mr X lives alone with his mother. Mr X was a new member at the day centre but had had a long career as a mental health service user (owing to his angry behaviours he had been ?asked to leave? his previous day centre). The stated and overt purpose of our relationship was to collaborate towards ameliorating his situation. This work more commonly consisted of offering emotional and practical support, but, when first assigned Mr X, I was told by my practice assessor that eventually I would be required to carry out a risk assessment of him. So, for the purposes of this essay, I will focus on the ethical problems and dilemmas I encountered in the progression leading towards, and the actual process of carrying out, an assessment of the supposed risk that Mr X may pose either to himself, others or both. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Stand-up so closely resembles-and is meant to resemble-the styles and expectations of everyday speech that the idea of technique and technical mastery we typically associate with art is almost rendered invisible. Technique and technical mastery is as much about the understanding and development of audiences as collaborators as it is the generation of material. Doing so requires encountering audiences in places that by custom or design encourage ludic and vernacular talk-social spaces and third spaces such as bars, coffee houses, (...) and clubs. Cultivating uncultivated speech and cultivating real audiences in found settings form the background of developing the stand-up comedian, neither of which lend themselves to the conservatory tradition we think of when we think of the development of artists. This article addresses two areas of the overall question of stand-up as art, starting with the ontological question of stand-up comedy: if it is an art where is it located, and what we may mean by “artworks” and “artworld” in stand-up comedy? Then I consider whether stand-up comedy as practiced can be reconciled with several recent definitions for art and note some of the special conditions and contexts for stand-up. (shrink)

Family medicine has grown as a specialty from its early days of general practice. It was established as a Board Certified specialty in 1969. This growth and maturation can be traced in the philosophy of family medicine as articulated by Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D. Long before it was popular to do so, Pellegrino supported the development of family medicine. In this essay I examine the development of Pellegrino's philosophical thought about family practice, and contrast it to other thinkers like Ian (...) McWhinney, Kerr White, Walter Spitzer, Donald Ransom, and Hebert Vandervoort. The arguments focus on whether the goals of family medicine and family practice (possibly two distinct entities) can be articulated, especially considering the definitional problems of family and community. I conclude by echoing Pellegrino's hope that family medicine can contribute a fresh alternative to isolated, individualistic and technological thinking in medicine. (shrink)

This article unfolds in three stages. First, it locates the emergence of modern conceptions of social justice in industrializing Europe, and especially in the discovery of the “social,” which provided a particular idiom for the liberal democratic politics for most of the twentieth century. Second, the article links this particular conception of the social to the political rationalities of the postwar welfare state and the identity of the social citizen. Finally, the article discusses the myriad ways in which this legacy (...) of the social and social justice has been disrupted, although not yet fully displaced, by the economic orthodoxies and individualization that inform the contemporary neoliberal governing project in Canada. The result, the article concludes, has been the institutionalization of insecurity, which demands the renewal of a social way of seeing and a politics of social justice on local and global scales. (shrink)

First published 1966 Includes index Includes bibliographical references Campion Collection.

This essay explores the place in Clarice Lispector’s literature that seeks to touch a primary ground of the living with a language that exceeds the symbolic in order to read it from an anthropocenic, posthuman, and feminist present. It argues that the story “A menor mulher do mundo” (Laços de família, 1960) takes to an extreme what happens in all of Lispector’s literature at the point that we can find in Macabéa’s character from A hora da estrela (1976), a sort (...) of continuation of the smallest woman in the world. In both – the story and the novel – materiality comes to life and it is associated with a neutral background that goes beyond the difference between the human and the nonhuman, the feminine and the masculine, and that coincides with language, with the word. Both characters are residue and resistance, and operate in the stories in the same way that the word operates in Lispector’s writing. The Deleuzian concept of minor and its continuation on the concept of immanence are therefore read not only as a way to think beyond the species, but also as that which operates by destabilizing the concept of “woman” as a universal. Lispector’s writing, then, allows us to separate contemporary feminisms from an affirmation of the identity of the feminine and the masculine, to take them instead into an order that – regardless of whether embodied in woman – is outside the patriarchal. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This paper addresses one aspect of the natural law theory of Germain Grisez. According to Grisez, practical reason identifies the goods of human life prior to the invocation of any moral or normative notions. It can thus provide a non-normative foundation for moral theory. I present Grisez’s position and argue that the apparently non-normative aspect of natural law cannot support the moral position built upon it. I argue, in particular, that practical principles, as Grisez understands them, are best understood as (...) speech acts. If this is correct, it is possible to develop a sceptical challenge to Grisez’s position. (shrink)

A prominent tradition in Nietzsche scholarship reads his views about will to power as a psychological thesis and his claims about the value of power as an attempt to derive normativity from psychological necessity. This article shows that these interpretations have failed to articulate a cogent reading faithful to Nietzsche’s texts, and so casts doubt on such an approach. My argument bears not only on how we read Nietzsche, but also on the viability of one recent constitutivist reading. After presenting (...) these critical arguments, I consider an original interpretation of will to power in terms of the motivation to grow. This revised interpretation, however, still fails to support the tradition’s derivation of normativity. Thus, I conclude we should look elsewhere for Nietzsche’s normative argument. (shrink)

There can be no reasonable doubt that our living species Homo sapiens is fully integrated into the great Tree of Life that unites all living organisms on this planet. But it is also obvious that we are not just another run-of-the mill primate. But what distinguishes us most strongly from those relatives – and all other organisms – is something more abstract: the unusual and unprecedented way in which we process information in our minds. That is not so in our (...) case, and a useful shorthand descriptor of the difference between us and them is that we think symbolically. In other words, we mentally deconstruct our exterior and interior worlds into a vocabulary of discrete symbols and then rearrange them, according to rules, to describe those worlds not only as they are, but as they might be. (shrink)

Why does it seem better to be a pauper who becomes a king rather than a king who becomes a pauper even when each life contains an equivalent sum of goods to the other? Many argue that only the pauper-to-king life can be told as a redemption story and that it is good for you to live a redemption story. This paper calls that explanation into question and proposes an alternative: upward-trending lives reveal growth. I argue that growth is a (...) valuable feature of a life, that redemption is not, and that growth explains intuitions cited in favor of redemption. (shrink)

This article examines India’s response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of agricultural production and innovation, India has recently launched an ambitious soil health programme. The country’s Soil Health Card (SHC) Scheme intervenes in farm-scale decisions about efficient fertiliser use, envisioning farmers as managers and soil as a substrate for production. India is also home to one of the world’s largest alternative agriculture movements: natural farming. This puts farmer expertise at the centre of soil fertility and attends (...) to the wider ecological health of soils. Despite emerging as a mode of resistance to dominant agricultural systems, natural farming is now being delivered in increasingly bureaucratic ways by India’s state governments. This article offers Himachal Pradesh as a case study in how the soil is governed, drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews with scientists, agricultural officers, non-governmental organisation leaders, and activists. Rather than assess approaches to soil health according to their ecological bottom line, we examine the differing forms of knowledge, expertise and ‘truth’ in the SHC and Natural Farming approaches. Our analysis reveals discontinuities in how farmers are imagined, as well as continuities in how quasi-spiritual language combines in a bionationalist project, positing assumptions about the correct arrangement of life in nationalist terms. We point to a shift toward hybrid and pick-and-mix approaches to soil health, as farmers and their organisers are increasingly invested with the capacities to combine multiple options. We see a fracturing of expertise and the opening up of epistemic pluralism in responses to the soil fertility crisis. (shrink)

Despite US policy documents which recommend that in areas of environmental risk, interaction between scientific experts and the public move beyond the so-called “Decide, Announce, and Defend model,” many current public involvement policies still do not guarantee meaningful public participation. In response to this problem, various attempts have been made to define what counts as sufficient or meaningful participation and free informed consent from those affected. Though defining “meaningfulness” is a complex task, this paper explores one under-examined dimension that concerns (...) the relationship between consent and the idea that citizens should be sufficiently informed: epistemic capacity. This paper will look at some of the work on meaningful participation and consent, give a definition of epistemic capacity, and argue that only a community with sufficient epistemic capacity can have the understanding and competence to give informed enough consent and thus participate meaningfully. (shrink)

`The work develops and articulates a brilliant and original central thesis; namely that modern individuals are best understood as complex bodies of thought, as embodied symbolic and material beings. Future work on mind, self, body, society and culture will have to begin with Burkitt's text' - Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois `After his excellent Social Selves, Ian Burkitt has produced a new theory of embodiment which will become required reading for those working in the areas of social theory, sociology, (...) cultural studies and social psychology. Steering between constructionist and realist theories of the social actor, Bodies of Thought provides an innovative assessment of Foucaultian, Eliasian, and feminist approaches to the body and a sustained critique of Cartesian notions of the subject' - Chris Shilling, Department of Social and Historical Studies, University of Portsmouth In this incisive and truly impressive book, Ian Burkitt critically addresses the dualism between mind and body, thought and emotion, rationality and irrationality, and the mental and the material, which haunt the post-Cartesian world. Drawing on the work of contemporary social theorists and feminist writers, he argues that thought and the sense of being a person is inseparable from bodily practices within social relations, even though such active experience may be abstracted and expanded upon through the use of symbols. Overcoming classic dualisms in social thought, Burkitt argues that bodies are not purely the constructs of discourses of power: they are also productive, communicative, and invested with powerful capacities for changing the social and natural worlds. He goes on to consider how such powers can be developed in more ethical forms of relations and activities. Bodies of Thought will be essential reading for students and academics in social theory, social psychology, cultural studies, feminist theory and the sociology of the body. (shrink)

Rival Enlightenments, first published in 2001, is a major reinterpretation of early modern German intellectual history. Ian Hunter approaches philosophical doctrines as ways of fashioning personae for envisaged historical circumstances, here of confessional conflict and political desacralization. He treats the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius and the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz and Kant as rival intellectual cultures or paideiai, thereby challenging all histories premised on Kant's supposed reconciliation and transcendence of the field. This study reveals the extraordinary historical self-consciousness (...) of the civil philosophers, who repudiated university metaphysics as inimical to the intellectual formation of those administering desacralized territorial states. The book argues that the marginalization of civil philosophy in post-Kantian philosophical history may itself be seen as a continuation of the struggle between the rival enlightenments. Combining careful and well-documented scholarship with vivid polemic, Hunter presents penetrating insights for philosophers and historians alike. (shrink)

It is one of Sartre's greatest strengths that his declared aim was 'to write for his own time'. From the 1940s onward, he became ever less interested in 'timeless' questions, and ever more concerned to explore the concrete realities of his own age. This engagement with the contemporary makes it particularly tempting to consider what Sartre's responses to the events of our own age would be. Ever since his death in 1980, those of us who have drawn insight and inspiration (...) from Sartre's works have tended to ask how Sartre might have judged particular political developments. And because of the central place given to violence in his thought, as well as his detailed reflections on the Second World War and the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, it is only natural to ask how Sartre would have responded to the appalling events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent 'war on terror'. (shrink)

Business ethics is currently a significant and widely debated global issue, and one that no business can afford to ignore. In this book, the authors bring together a diverse range of views on the subject, arising from an international conference on business ethics.Chapters on highly topical issues such as GM foods, child labor and bribery will make this an important tool for many businesses.

I explain why Fernando Ferreira's interesting formal result does not threaten the bilateralist account of the sense of the connectives.

In this paper, we show how the problem of accounting for the semanticsof temporal preposition phrases (tPPs) leads us to some surprisinginsights into the semantics of temporal expressions ingeneral. Specifically, we argue that a systematic treatment of EnglishtPPs is greatly facilitated if we endow our meaning assignments with context variables, a device which allows a tPP to restrict domainsof quantification arising elsewhere in a sentence. We observe that theuse of context variables implies that tPPs can modify expressions intwo ways, and (...) we use this observation to predict the behaviour of tPPswhose complements are themselves modified by other tPPs. (shrink)

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a major health and human rights problem globally. However, empirical findings on the predictors of IPV cross-culturally are highly inconsistent, and the theory of IPV is underdeveloped. We propose a new analytical framework based on cooperative game theory in which IPV is a function of the power relations of the dyadic relationship, not simply the actors involved. Using data from the 2005 Colombian Demographic and Health Survey, we test the hypothesis that IPV is predicted by (...) large asymmetries in dyadic power using a hierarchical generalized linear model. Results suggest that education, urban residence, age at sexual debut, whether the woman has other sexual partners, and the age difference between spouses have strong effects on the log-odds of a woman experiencing IPV. Cooperative game theory and social network analysis offer a general approach to the problem of intimate partner interactions which can be applied broadly cross-culturally. (shrink)

It is suggested that, pace Michael Golby, recourse to metaphor has little role to play in enabling governing bodies to come to terms with their new and onerous responsibilities. The better way forward is a clearer appreciation of what is demanded of them by law.

Relativism in psychology unravels the truth-claims and oppressive\npractices of the discipline, but simply relativizing psychological knowledge\nhas not been sufficient to comprehend and combat the discipline\nas part of the ‘psy-complex’. For that, a balanced review of the contribution\nand problems of relativism needs to work dialectically, and so\nthis article reviews four problematic rhetorical balancing strategies in\nrelativism before turning to the contribution of critical realism. Critical\nrealism exposes positivist psychology’s pretensions to model itself\non what it imagines the natural sciences to be, and it grounds (...) discursive\naccounts of mentation in social practices. The problem is that those\nsympathetic to mainstream psychology are also appealing to ‘realism’\nto warrant it as a science and to discredit critical research that situates\npsychological phenomena. Our use of critical realism calls for an\naccount of how psychological facts are socially constructed within\npresent social arrangements and for an analysis of the underlying historical\nconditions that gave rise to the ‘psy-complex’. Only by understanding\nhow the discipline of psychology reproduces notions of\nindividuality and human nature, a critical realist endeavour, will it be\npossible to transform it, and to socially construct it as something different. (shrink)

I compare three sorts of case in which philosophers have argued that we cannot assert the Law of Excluded Middle for statements of identity. Adherents of Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis deny that Excluded Middle holds for statements saying that an infinitesimal is identical with zero. Derek Parfit contended that, in certain sci-fi scenarios, the Law does not hold for some statements of personal identity. He also claimed that it fails for the statement ‘England in 1065 was the same nation as England (...) in 1067’. I argue that none of these cases poses a serious threat to Excluded Middle. My analysis of the last example casts doubt on the principle of the Determinacy of Distinctness. While David Wiggins's ‘conceptualist realism’ provides a metaphysics which can dispense with that principle, it leaves no house-room for infinitesimals. (shrink)