Ives, Rosslyn The emergence of freethought in Western Europe and its colonies seems to be an almost inevitable outcome of the many changes that had occurred during the preceding centuries - changes that expanded knowledge and understanding about the place of humans in the scheme of things.

In our seventh and final piece on the theme “Good without God”, Jonathan Ives argues that reliance on God as an external source of moral authority leads to a kind of moral cowardice.

What is poetry’s so-called ‘form-content unity’? In this paper, I argue that the idea of ‘form-content unity’, as derived from A. C. Bradley’s 1901 lecture, has been misconstrued by Peter Kivy, who believes that it is confused and vague. I argue that it has also been misconstrued, however, by the philosophers who find the idea insightful and instructive and present themselves as defending and developing it against Kivy’s criticisms. Crucially, Bradley’s argument emphasizes that hearing is necessary to any ‘poetic’ reading (...) of a metrical poem, but this focus on sound and metre tends to be ignored. A precision of terminology—particularly a reformulation of the paraphrase ‘form-content unity’—offers an improved understanding of Bradley’s claims. The lecture, I argue, properly understood, in fact supports the call for a shift of attention away from understanding poems as ‘form-content unities’ in the philosophy of poetry. (shrink)

A primer of the often overlooked yet significant writings of Marx on religion.

In this paper we set forth what we believe to be a relatively controversial argument, claiming that 'bioethics' needs to undergo a fundamental change in the way it is practised. This change, we argue, requires philosophical bioethicists to adopt reflexive practices when applying their analyses in public forums, acknowledging openly that bioethics is an embedded socio-cultural practice, shaped by the ever-changing intuitions of individual philosophers, which cannot be viewed as a detached intellectual endeavour. This said, we argue that in order (...) to manage the personal, social and cultural embeddedness of bioethics, philosophical bioethicists should openly acknowledge how their practices are constructed and should, in their writing, explicitly deal with issues of bias and conflict of interest, just as empirical scientists are required to do. (shrink)

This archive manuscript is an English translation of a 25-page excerpt from Marx’s Manuscript of 1867–68, which was published for the first time in German in 2012 in the MEGA, Volume II/4.3. This excerpt is Marx’s first and only attempt to incorporate unequal turnover times across industries into his theory of the equalisation of the profit rate and prices of production. The excerpt considers three cases: unequal turnover times across industries, unequal compositions of capital across industries, and both (...) of these inequalities together. It also emphasises two concepts of the rate of profit: rate of profit on capital advanced and rate of profit on the cost price. (shrink)

A selection of Karl Marx's most important writings are contained in this volume. It was designed as a companion to Elster's "An introduction to Karl Marx" but may be used alone.

Over the last decade, patient and public involvement (PPI) has become a requisite in applied health research. Some funding bodies demand explicit evidence of PPI, while others have made a commitment to developing PPI in the projects they fund. Despite being commonplace, there remains a dearth of engagement with the ethical and theoretical underpinnings of PPI processes and practices. More specifically, while there is a small (but growing) body of literature examining the effectiveness and impact of PPI, there has been (...) relatively little reflection on whether the concept/practice of PPI is internally coherent. Here, the authors unpick a ‘paradox’ within PPI, which highlights a tension between its moral and pragmatic motivations and its implementation. The authors argue that this ‘professionalisation paradox’ means we need to rethink the practice, and purpose, of PPI in research. (shrink)

La Doctrine de la science Nova Methodo est l'oeuvre maitresse de la production fichteenne de l'epoque de Iena. Construite sur les resultats des Principes de la Doctrine de la science, mais allant, aux dires memes de l'auteur, plus loin dans le developpement des principes, elle commande, grace a la deduction de l'intersubjectivite, les parties pratiques du systeme telles que le droit et l'ethique. Loin d'etre un atout mineur, la theorie de l'intersubjectivite est censee constituer la clef de voute de la (...) Doctrine de la science et meme de tout l'idealisme critique: elle a pour fonction d'etablir un pont entre le monde intelligible et le monde sensible, de depasser le dualisme kantien des phenomenes et des noumenes, et d'achever le systeme dont Kant aurait seulement jete les bases. (shrink)

Ives, Rosslyn Review of: Forgotten war, by Henry Reynolds, NewSouth, 2013. $29.99.

Ives, Rosslyn Review of: Reclaiming Epicurus, by Luke Slattery, Penguin Specials, 2012. $9.99.

Ives, Rosslyn Review of: The most good you can do: How effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically, by Peter Singer, Text Publishing Melbourne 2015.

Ives, Rosslyn Review of: The swerve: How the renaissance began, by Stephen Greenblatt, Publisher The Bodley Head, London 2011.

This edition of McLellan's comprehensive selection of Marx's writings includes carefully selected extracts from the whole range of Marx's most important pieces alongside a fully revised and updated bibliography and editorial commentary on each document. New editorial introductions to each section of the book provide the reader with the background and context of Marx's writing in each period. Essential reading for anyone wishing for a detailed overview of Marx's political philosophy.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have attempted to save the concept of ?hegemony? from its economistic and essentialist Marxist roots by incorporating the linguistic influences of post?structuralist theory. Their major Marxist detractors criticise their trajectory as a ?descent into discourse? ? a decay from well?grounded, material reality into the idealistic and problematic realm of language and discourse. Both sides of the debate seem to agree on one thing: the line from Marxism to post?Marxism is the line from the economy to (...) language, from ?reality? to discourse. This article focuses on Gramsci?s writings on language to argue against both sides of this debate. It illustrates how language is central to Gramsci?s historical materialism and that he does not oppose it to materiality. It argues that Gramsci adopted the very term hegemony substantially from his university studies in linguistics ? the debates from which Ferdinand de Saussure also developed structuralism. For Gramsci, such linguistic issues were directly related to the ?questione della lingua? and Italian unification. Moreover, language lies at the centre of Gramsci?s understanding of the relationship between coercion and consent. This not only troubles Laclau & Mouffe?s reading of Gramsci, but it illuminates a more productive conception of hegemony that can address recent debates around post?structuralism and the use of ?hegemony? to analyse globalisation and an increasingly technological and electronic world. (shrink)

This paper responds to the commentaries from Stacy Carter and Alan Cribb. We pick up on two main themes in our response. First, we reflect on how the process of setting standards for empirical bioethics research entails drawing boundaries around what research counts as empirical bioethics research, and we discuss whether the standards agreed in the consensus process draw these boundaries correctly. Second, we expand on the discussion in the original paper of the role and significance of the concept of (...) ‘integrating’ empirical methods and ethical argument as a standard for research practice within empirical bioethics. (shrink)

It features Easton and Guddat's own highly regarded translations (based on the best German editions as well as on the original manuscripts and first editions) ...

Quelle est la légitimité de l’accusation de constructivisme adressée par Jacobi à la « Doctrine de la Science » de Fichte? Il apparaît que Jacobi commet une double erreur, méthodologique et matérielle : d’une part il n’a pas suffisamment réfléchi sur le statut de sa propre démarche, d’autre part il gomme complètement l’assise pratique du système fichtéen, enracinée dans le sentiment ( Gefühl ).

BackgroundChronic kidney disease is a significant cause of global deaths. Those who progress to end-stage kidney disease often commence dialysis as a life-extending treatment. For cognitively impaired patients, the decision as to whether they commence dialysis will fall to someone else. This scoping review was conducted to map existing literature pertaining to how decisions about dialysis are and should be made with, for, and on behalf of adult patients who lack decision-making capacity. In doing so, it forms the basis of (...) a larger body of work that is exploring how these decisions ought to be made.MethodsTo identify relevant papers, searches were conducted on Ovid MEDLINE(R), Embase, PsychINFO, The Cochrane Library, and Web of Science. Inclusion criteria were then applied, requiring that papers: report on empirical studies about how decisions about dialysis are made and/or discuss how decisions about dialysis should be made with, for, and on behalf of adult patients who lack decision-making capacity; be published from 1961 onwards; and be published in English. This resulted in 27 papers eligible for inclusion.ResultsOf note, the majority of papers originated in the United States. There was wide variation across the included papers. Extracted data were grouped under the following themes: involving various parties (patient involvement, family dominance, and wider communication); objectivity about care options (including difficulties with family detachment); cultural sensitivity; medical versus non-medical factors; managing nonadherent patients; and the role and prevalence of substituted judgement. The literature shows that there is inconsistency in the principles and processes surrounding decisions made about dialysis with, for, and on behalf of adult patients who lack decision-making capacity.ConclusionsThis scoping review demonstrates that there is significant variation in both the practice and theory of dialysis decision making with, for, and on behalf of cognitively impaired adult patients. Complexity arises in considering who should get a say, how influential their say should be in a decision, and what factors are most relevant to the decision. A lack of up-to-date literature exploring this issue is highlighted, with this scoping review providing a useful groundwork from which further research can be undertaken. (shrink)

Ives, Rosslyn On February 12, Humanists and many others around the world will celebrate Charles Darwin's birthday. We do this because his most significant contribution to human knowledge, as set out in On Origin of the Species, is the evidence and arguments for evolution by natural selection. By taking a scientific approach, Darwin along with many others changed the way humans understand their origins and place in the biosphere. We are not the product of special creation, but rather naturally evolved (...) beings, fully interdependent with the rest of the natural world. (shrink)

Ives, Rosslyn Review of: Labor's historic mission, by Brian Ellis, Pamphleteer series No. 1, Australian Scholarly Publishing.

In this article we distinguish between philosophical bioethics (PB), descriptive policy orientated bioethics (DPOB) and normative policy oriented bioethics (NPOB). We argue that finding an appropriate methodology for combining empirical data and moral theory depends on what the aims of the research endeavour are, and that, for the most part, this combination is only required for NPOB. After briefly discussing the debate around the is/ought problem, and suggesting that both sides of this debate are misunderstanding one another (i.e. one side (...) treats it as a conceptual problem, whilst the other treats it as an empirical claim), we outline and defend a methodological approach to NPOB based on work we have carried out on a project exploring the normative foundations of paternal rights and responsibilities. We suggest that given the prominent role already played by moral intuition in moral theory, one appropriate way to integrate empirical data and philosophical bioethics is to utilize empirically gathered lay intuition as the foundation for ethical reasoning in NPOB. The method we propose involves a modification of a long-established tradition on non-intervention in qualitative data gathering, combined with a form of reflective equilibrium where the demands of theory and data are given equal weight and a pragmatic compromise reached. (shrink)

Ives, Rosslyn Review(s) of: Bigger or better: Australia's population debate, by Ian Lowe, University of Queensland Press, 2012, $34.95.

Reinhold, chantre de la philosophie kantienne qu’il a cherché à systématiser, quitte en 1794, alors qu’il est au faîte de la gloire, Iéna pour Kiel. A peine trois ans plus tard, en février 1797, il stupéfie le monde intellectuel en se déclarant publiquement le disciple de Fichte, le jeune professeur qui lui a succédé à Iéna. Cet article cherche à établir les raisons de cette conversion.

In recent years there has been a wealth of literature arguing the need for empirical and interdisciplinary approaches to bioethics, based on the premise that an empirically informed ethical analysis is more grounded, contextually sensitive and therefore more relevant to clinical practice than an ‘abstract’ philosophical analysis. Bioethics has (arguably) always been an interdisciplinary field, and the rise of ‘empirical’ (bio)ethics need not be seen as an attempt to give a new name to the longstanding practice of interdisciplinary collaboration, but (...) can perhaps best be understood as a substantive attempt to engage with the nature of that interdisciplinarity and to articulate the relationship between the many different disciplines (some of them empirical) that contribute to the field. It can also be described as an endeavour to explain how different disciplinary approaches can be integrated to effectively answer normative questions in bioethics, and fundamental to that endeavour is the need to think about how a robust methodology can be articulated that successfully marries apparently divergent epistemological and metaethical perspectives with method. This paper proposes ‘Reflexive Bioethics’ (RB) as a methodology for interdisciplinary and empirical bioethics, which utilizes a method of ‘Reflexive Balancing’ (RBL). RBL has been developed in response to criticisms of various forms of reflective equilibrium, and is built upon a pragmatic characterization of Bioethics and a ‘quasi-moral foundationalism’, which allows RBL to avoid some of the difficulties associated with RE and yet retain the flexible egalitarianism that makes it intuitively appealing to many. (shrink)

This article builds on my previous article on Dirk H. Th. Vollenhoven (Ive 2015) and provides an overview of the development of the systematic philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd. This article seeks to provide an overview of the key developments in the thinking of Dooyeweerd, both in the convergences arising from the conversation of the two brothers-in-law and long-term colleagues and in their divergences. Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven worked within the tradition of Abraham Kuyper, the father of Reformational philosophy. The development of (...) their respective philosophical systematics has tended to be addressed separately. However, I argue that the close cooperation between the two philosophers was critical in the formulation of the philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea. The philosophical conversation between the two persisted, despite critical divergences, largely aired privately. Their respective insights remained a source of mutual stimulus and complementarity foundational for Reformational philosophy. (shrink)

This volume presents those writings of Marx that best reveal his contribution to sociology, particularly to the theory of society and social change.