Critical posthumanism as a philosophical, antifascist nonhierarchical imagination for nursing offers a liberatory passageway forward amidst environmental collapse, an epic pandemic, global authoritarianism, extreme health and wealth disparities, over‐reliance on technology and empirics, and unjust societal systems based in whiteness. Drawing upon philosophical and theoretical works from Black and Indigenous scholars, Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought, and Kaba's abolitionist organizing among others, we as activist nurse scholars continue the speculative discussion outlined in prior papers. Here (...) we further imagine how we can engage a radical philosophical mission of care for all beings human and non, walking and working alongside the people and communities nurses accompany, connected as we are on this dystopian celestial orb. Discussion is centred on critical analyses of traditional justice framing in nursing, and on the praxis possibilities found within rhizomatic thought, making kin, and just episteme while knitting filaments of nursing theory and history, humming song lyrics from collective memory, and critically dismantling received wisdoms to stumble toward a more emancipatory present future. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the process of entanglement at the 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference (IPNC) at University of California at Irvine held on August 18, 2022. Representing collective work from the US, Canada, UK and Germany, our panel entitled ‘What can critical posthuman philosophies do for nursing?’ examined critical posthumanism and its operations and potential in nursing. Critical posthumanism offers an antifascist, feminist, material, affective, and ecologically entangled approach to nursing and healthcare. Rather than focusing on (...) the arguments of each of the three distinct but interrelated panel presentation pieces, this paper instead focuses on process and performance (per/formance) and performativity as relational, connected and situated, with connections to nursing philosophy. Building upon critical feminist and new materialist philosophies, we describe intra‐activity and performativity as ways to dehierarchise knowledge making practices within traditional academic conference spaces. Creating critical cartographies of thinking and being are actions of possibility for building more just and equitable futures for nursing, nurses, and those they accompany—including all humans, nonhumans, and more than human matter. (shrink)

Stimulated by our conversations at the 2018 International Philosophy of Nursing Society Conference and our shared interests, the coauthors present an argument for augmenting the broader discussion of “missed care” with our synthesized concept called structural missingness. We take the problem of missed care to be largely grounded on a particular economic construction of the healthcare system within an era of what some are calling the Capitalocene, capturing the pervasive influence of capitalism on nature, humanity and the world order. Our (...) perspective is that of the United States, however, extrapolations can be made to the social and healthcare systems in other countries. We are concerned with the underlying conditions that structurally reify inequality and ultimately undermine nursing practice. To situate the discussion, we briefly review existing literature on the contextualization of missed care. We understand contemporary circumstances of missed care as a function of the neoliberalization of healthcare, including the idea of nursing as a commodity. From this, we discuss the implications of missed care, which forms the basis of our critique. Synthesizing the term “structural missingness, we locate a moral imperative in the professional and disciplinary commitments of nursing to consider who and what have been left out. This moral imperative for the nursing profession, along with other social and health related professions, underscores our obligation to be involved in uncovering inequities and conceptualizing upstream solutions for structural missingness. (shrink)

The Vitruvian Man is a metaphor for the “ideal man” by feminist posthuman philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2013) as a proxy for eurocentric humanist ideals. The first half of this paper extends Braidotti's concept by thinking about the metaphor of the “ideal nurse” (Vitruvian nurse) and how this metaphor contributes to racism, oppression, and burnout in nursing and might restrict the professionalization of nursing. The Vitruvian nurse is an idealized and perfected form of a nurse with self‐sacrificial language (re)producing self‐sacrificing expectations. (...) The second half of this paper looks at how regulatory frameworks (using the example of UK's Nursing and Midwifery Council Code of Conduct) institutionalize the conditions of possibility through collective imaginations. The domineering expectations found within the Vitruvian nurse metaphor and further codified by regulatory frameworks give rise to boredom and burnout. The paper ends by suggesting possible ways to diffract regulatory frameworks to practice with affirmative ethics and reduce feelings of self‐sacrifice and exhaustion among nurses. (shrink)

On 4 February 2021 a group of nurse scholar‐educators, nurses and other interested folks came together for the second of two virtual events to think together about the role of philosophy in the nursing world. The live streamed open access event provided an opportunity in the COVID‐19 pandemic for over 400 people to listen to five nursing scholars' presentations and to interact virtually through comments in chat and on the @IPONSociety Twitter social media platform. By reading the comments and questions (...) that were generated, and by looking at the social media comments related to the event, it is apparent that philosophy is an important thinking practice for nurses but many audience members critically expressed they felt excluded. Critical issues were raised by participants in chat and on Twitter—pointedly around the need for more representative voices—including the imperative to open nursing philosophy to diverse and disparate worldviews. This dialogue provides a summary of critical points raised during the live question and answer session for the panel entitled Addressing Current Debates in Nursing Theory, Education, Practice as well as examing comments selected from the @IPONSociety Twitter space in response to the panel. One commenter said it was great to see the discussion being lifted up from the influential roots of white supremacy, while other nurses expressed that they wished the panellists themselves were more diverse. In discussion of key takeaway, links are made to historical and ongoing structural oppressions in nursing where thinking practices like nursing philosophy and theory are still dominated by world views emanating from positionalities of able‐bodied cis‐gendered heterosexual western eurocentric whiteness. (shrink)

Despite the prominence of person‐centred care (PCC) in nursing, there is no general agreement on the assumptions and the meaning of PCC. We sympathize with the work of others who rethink PCC towards relational, embedded, and temporal selfhood rather than individual personhood. Our perspective addresses criticism of humanist assumptions in PCC using critical posthumanism as a diffraction from dominant values We highlight the problematic realities that might be produced in healthcare, leading to some people being more likely to be disenfranchised (...) from healthcare than others. We point to the colonial, homo‐ and transphobic, racist, ableist, and ageist consequences of humanist traditions that have influenced the development of PCC. We describe the deep rooted conditions that structurally uphold inequality and undermine nursing practice that PCC reproduces. We advocate for the self‐determination of patients and emphasize that we support the fundamental mechanisms of PCC enabling patients' choice; however, without critical introspection, these are limited to a portion of humans. Last, we present limitations of our perspective based on our white*‐cisheteropatriarchy** positionality. We point to the fact that any reimagining of models such as PCC should be carefully done by listening, following, and ceding power to people with diversity dimensions*** and the lived experience or expertise that exists from diverse perspectives. We point towards Black, queer feminism, and critical disabilities studies to contextualize our point of critique with humanism and PCC to amplify equity for all people and communities. Theory and philosophy are useful to understand restrictive factors in healthcare delivery and to inform systematic strategies to improve the quality of care so as not to perpetuate the oppression of groups of people with diversity dimensions. *We purposely capitalize Black and use lower case for white to decentre whiteness and as an intentional act of antiracism (see White Homework a podcast series by Tori W. Douglas). **Cisheteropatriarchy describes people with intersecting identities of dominant social groups; cisgender is the gender identity that aligns with the gender you were assigned at birth, hetero means heterosexual, and patriarchy refers to structural systems of power based on maleness where women are often excluded and hold less power. ***With diversity dimensions, we refer to subjective lived experience and material realities of people that exist outside the ‘dominant minorities' of white‐cisheteropatriarchy, meaning groups of people in society who historically and currently hold more power and through this, structurally dominate the norms and possibilities of living for other people. (shrink)

This article summarizes a virtual live‐streamed panel event that occurred in August 2020 and was cosponsored by the International Philosophy of Nursing Society (IPONS) and the University of California, Irvine's Center for Nursing Philosophy. The event consisted of a series of three self‐contained panel discussions focusing on the past, present and future of IPONS and was moderated by the current Chair of IPONS, Catherine Green. The first panel discussion explored the history of IPONS and the journal Nursing Philosophy. The second (...) panel involved a reflection on the challenges of doing nursing philosophy in a research‐intensive context of a Canadian university and the history and current movements in nursing philosophy in the Nordic countries. The final panel involved presentations on the future potential for philosophy in/and for nursing, the critical connections between nursing philosophy and nursing theory, dismantling racism in nursing and the potential for process philosophy to help explore nursing's unique efficacy in creating possibilities for health. The panels were followed by a lively Q&A session with participants, of which there were 252 registrants from across the globe. The event underscored the wide and diverse interests of nurses in philosophical discussion and the need for more virtual events and other connective modalities bringing nurses together to discuss and analyze the value and potential of philosophy to better understand and advance nursing theory and practice. (shrink)

With this paper, we walk out some central ideas about posthumanisms and the ways in which nursing is already deeply entangled with them. At the same time, we point to ways in which nursing might benefit from further entanglement with other ideas emerging from posthumanisms. We first offer up a brief history of posthumanisms, following multiple roots to several points of formation. We then turn to key flavors of posthuman thought to differentiate between them and clarify our collective understanding and (...) use of the terms. This includes considerations of the threads of transhumanism, critical posthumanism, feminist new materialism, and the speculative, affirmative ethics that arise from critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism. These ideas are fruitful for nursing, and already in action in many cases, which is the matter we occupy ourselves with in the final third of the paper. We consider the ways nursing is already posthuman—sometimes even critically so—and the speculative worldbuilding of nursing as praxis. We conclude with visions for a critical posthumanist nursing that attends to humans and other/more/nonhumans, situated and material and embodied and connected, in relation. (shrink)

This paper describes the experience of an academic institution, the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), developing training courses about research integrity practices in authorship, publication, and Journal Peer Review. The importance of providing research integrity training in these areas is now widely accepted; however, it remains an open question how best to conduct this training. For this reason, it is vital for institutions, journals, and peak bodies to share learnings.We describe how we have collaborated across our institution to develop training (...) that supports QUT’s principles and which is in line with insights from contemporary research on best practices in learning design, universal design, and faculty involvement. We also discuss how we have refined these courses iteratively over time, and consider potential mechanisms for evaluating the effectiveness of the courses more formally. (shrink)

_Jane and Louise Wilson_ With Essays by Jeremy Millar and Claire Doherty London: Ellipsis, 2000 ISBN 1-84166-027-2 84 pp., inc. 120 b/w photograph.

We inhabit a world in which the market is a dominant institutional form of social organization. This influence is not without its critics, and there is considerable debate amongst political philosophers and policy-makers about whether the range of the market should expand or contract and, further, about the extent to which the market should be subject to constraints and government regulation. The expansion of the market into realms hitherto unknown is the theme of a number of recent books, including Michael (...) Sandel's What Money Can't Buy and Debra Satz's Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, which build on earlier work by, amongst others, Elizabeth Anderson, Margaret Jane Radin, and Michael Walzer. (shrink)

Unlike many of the major figures in Western philosophy, Kierkegaard explores many issues of interest to feminist theorists today. Moreover, he does so in a style—labyrinthine, many-voiced, multilayered, adverse to authority—that adumbrates _écriture féminine_. A major question probed in the volume is whether Kierkegaard's writings are misogynist, ambivalent, or essentialist in their views of women and the feminine or whether, in some important and vital ways, they are liberatory and empowering for feminists and women trying to free themselves from the (...) maze of patriarchal constructs. The essays also show how the three existence-spheres—aesthetic, ethical, and religious—articulated in Kierkegaard's authorship inscribe different modalities of the sexual relation: seduction for the aesthetic, marriage for the ethical, and absence from commerce with the other sex for the religious. Contributors are Sylviane Agacinski, Wanda Warren Berry, Birgit Bertung, Jane Duran, Leslie A. Howe, Céline Léon, Tamsin Lorraine, Robert L. Perkins, Mark L. Taylor, Sylvia Walsh, and Julia Watkin. (shrink)

Dewey continues to offer arguments that remain powerful on the need to break down the divisions between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ in terms of his specific theory of knowledge. Dewey's writings are used to argue that a democratic curriculum needs to challenge such divisions to encompass the many forms of knowledge necessary in the contemporary classroom. Gandin and Apple's investigation of community participation (Orçamento Participativo or Participatory Budgeting) in the curriculum of the Citizen School in Porto Alegre, Brazil, will be explored (...) as an example of democratic structures informing educational planning. The work of Paul Hirst, Atli Harđarson and Chris Jane Brough is analysed regarding the issue of curriculum aims and student negotiation. Dewey's emphasis on learning as a collective enterprise will resonate here. Brough offers innovative research on student-centred curriculum integration that suggests even very young children are able to participate in debate over their own learning. Hirst and Harđarson provide contrasting views on the issue of curriculum aims—Hirst arguing that a curriculum cannot exist without definable aims while Harđarson challenges the very notion of settled aims if students are to be reflexive regarding their education. The article also refers to the work of Alexander on the use of dialogic questioning in the classroom. Such questioning, it is suggested, enhances and encourages collaborative forms of enquiry necessary for a democratic curriculum through discussion between teachers, students and other stakeholders. (shrink)

Long recognized as one of the main branches of political science, political theory has in recent years burgeoned in many different directions. Close textual analysis of historical texts sits alongside more analytical work on the nature and normative grounds of political values. Continental and post-modern influences jostle with ones from economics, history, sociology, and the law. Feminist concerns with embodiment make us look at old problems in new ways, and challenges of new technologies open whole new vistas for political theory. (...) This Handbook provides comprehensive and critical coverage of the lively and contested field of political theory, and will help set the agenda for the field for years to come. Forty-five chapters by distinguished political theorists look at the state of the field, where it has been in the recent past, and where it is likely to go in future. They examine political theory's edges as well as its core, the globalizing context of the field, and the challenges presented by social, economic, and technological changes."This is a unique and impressive set of analyses about scholarship in political theory. It is comprehensive, as we would expect. Beyond that, it is remarkably creative in the way that Dryzek, Honig and Phillips have organized categories, and it includes much overdue reference to scholarship on non-Western and postcolonial thought."-Iris Marion Young, Late Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago"This extraordinary series offers 'state of the art' assessments that instruct, engage, and provoke. Both synoptic and directive, the fine essays across these superbly edited volumes reflect the ambitions and diversity of political science. No one who is immersed in the discipline's controversies and possibilities should miss the intellectual stimulation and critical appraisal these works so powerfully provide."-Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia UniversityJohn S. Dryzek is Professor of Social and Political Theory at Australian National University.Bonnie Honig is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.Anne Phillips is Professor of Gender Theory at the London School of Economics.Introduction, John S Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne PhilipsI. CONTEMPORARY CURRENTS1. Justice After Rawls, Richard Arneson2. Power After Foucault, Wendy Brown3. Critical Theory Beyond Habermas, William E Scheuerman4. Feminist Theory and the Canon of Political Thought, Linda Zerilli5. After the Linguistic Turn: Poststructuralist and Liberal Pragmatist Political Theory, Paul Patton6. The Pluralist Imagination, David SchlosbergII. THE LEGACY OF THE PAST7. Theory in History: Problems of Context and Narrative, J G A Pocock8. The Political Theory of Classical Greece, Jill Frank9. Republican Visions, Eric Nelson10. Modernity and its Critics, Jane Bennett11. The History of Political Thought, as Disciplinary Genre, James FarrIII. POLITICAL THEORY IN THE WORLD12. The Challenge of European Union, Richarad Bellamy13. East Asia and the West: The Impact of Confucianism on Anglo-American Political Thought, Daniel A Bell14. In the Beginning all the World was America: American Exceptionalism in New Contexts, Ronald J Schmidt Jr15. Changing Interpretations of Modern and Contemporary Islamic Political Theory, Roxanne L EubenIV. STATE AND PEOPLE16. Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law, Shannon Stimson17. Emergency Powers, John Ferejohn and Pasquale Pasquino18. The People, Margaret Canovan19. Civil Society and State, Simone Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein20. Democracy and the State, Mark E Warren21. Democracy and Citize. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 25-48 [Access article in PDF] Postcolonialism's Archive Fever Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy Jacques Derrida. Archive Fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. ________. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. (...) 271-313. 1. Reading the Subaltern Archivally--or, Back to Antiquity Many readers of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" have been disturbed by Spivak's controversial answer to her own question, which is that "no scene of speaking" can arise for the subaltern woman; no discursive space can emerge from which she could formulate an "utterance." 1 One way of rephrasing Gayatri Spivak's highly resonant question might be, Can there be such a thing as a "postcolonial archive"? The purpose of our essay is to demonstrate just how crucial the concept of an "archive"--perhaps even a "postcolonial archive"--is for a more sympathetic understanding of Spivak's now notorious "silencing" of the subaltern woman. The underread and scarcely commented-on third and fourth sections of Spivak's essay raise the question, Can we approach the gendered subaltern more productively if our project is to recover not "lost voices" but rather lost texts? In the process of unpacking the textual complexities underlying Britain's 1829 abolition of sati (the widow's self-immolation on her husband's funeral pyre), Spivak pushes us further back in time when she observes intriguingly that "the archival... work involved here is indeed a task of 'measuring silences'" [286, our emphasis]. 2 We contend that her [End Page 25] choice of the term "archival" is highly motivated and can serve as the long-overdue occasion for a return to the largely unread sections of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"We can think of at least two risks involved in our undertaking. For one thing, revisitations to well-known essays can often seem more regressive than innovative. We are well aware that we may have to overcome a certain indifference on the part of readers who, feeling confident that they know it well, judge that "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (now over ten years old) has had its theoretical "moment" and should now give way to more current efforts to locate nonelite, subaltern subjectivity within a politics of resistance. A second concern is that because our project of reading the subaltern woman "archivally" must necessarily reexamine and justify Spivak's career-long engagement with Derrida and with deconstruction, we must be aware of the extent to which her deconstructive feminism has been prematurely and unfairly associated with the supposed political shortcomings of Derridean deconstruction, the regrettable result being an almost reflex aversion to her deconstructive theory within both feminism and postcolonialism. Despite these risks, however, we hope that our use of the archive as the governing principle for our return to Spivak's essay can pave the way for a more sympathetic reading of Spivak's "silent" subaltern. Our essay will argue that "Can the Subaltern Speak?" deserves a foundational or canonical status within postcolonial theory and should experience a "staying power" on the current critical scene as far-reaching and significant as Edward Said's Orientalism.Spivak's essay at one point refers quite literally to the concept of an archive, that is, the colonial "archive" of the East India Company, consisting of the "correspondence among the police stations, the lower and higher courts, the courts of directors, the prince regent's court," and so on [298]--all the documents instrumental in British law's recodification of sati from "ritual" to "crime" (also, we might add, the archive of subaltern historiography). 3 However, as Foucault's concept of the archive reminds us, the [End Page 26] archive is not just "that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive [in this case, legal] formation," but can also be conceptualized more abstractly as the "law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events... (shrink)

How do pictures represent? In this book Robert Hopkins casts new light on an ancient question by connecting it to issues in the philosophies of mind and perception. He starts by describing several striking features of picturing that demand explanation. These features strongly suggest that our experience of pictures is central to the way they represent, and Hopkins characterizes that experience as one of resemblance in a particular respect. He deals convincingly with the objections traditionally assumed to be (...) fatal to resemblance views, and shows how his own account is uniquely well placed to explain picturing's key features. His discussion engages in detail with issues concerning perception in general, including how to describe phenomena that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists, and the book concludes with an attempt to see what a proper understanding of picturing can tell us about that deeply mysterious phenomenon, the visual imagination. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate the locus of believability effects in syllogistic reasoning. We identify three points in the reasoning process at which such effects could occur: the initial interpretation of premises, the examination of alternative representations of them (in all of which any valid conclusion must be true), and the “filtering” of putative conclusions. The effect of beliefs at the first of these loci is well established. In this paper we report three experiments that examine whether beliefs have an (...) effect at the other two loci. In experiments 1 and 2 subjects drew their own conclusions from syllogisms that suggested believable or unbelievable ones. In the third experiment they evaluated conclusions that were presented to them. The data show that beliefs both affect the examination of alternative models and act as a filter on putative conclusions. We conclude by showing how some types of problem and some problem contents make the existence of alternative models more obvious than others. (shrink)

Kant's philosophy of arithmetic / by Charles Parsons -- Visual geometry / by James Hopkins -- The proof-structure of Kant's transcendental deduction / by Dieter Henrich -- Imagination and perception / by P.F. Strawson -- Kant's categories and their schematism / by Lauchlan Chipman -- Transcendental arguments / by Barry Stroud -- Strawson on transcendental idealism / by H.E. Matthews -- Self-knowledge / by W.H. Walsh -- The age and size of the world / by Jonathan Bennett.

Aesthetic judgements are autonomous, as many other judgements are not: for the latter, but not the former, it is sometimes justifiable to change one's mind simply because several others share a different opinion. Why is this? One answer is that claims about beauty are not assertions at all, but expressions of aesthetic response. However, to cover more than just some of the explananda, this expressivism needs combining with some analogue of cognitive command, i.e. the idea that disagreements over beuaty can (...) occur, and when they do it is a priori that one side has infringed the norms governing aesthetic discourse. This combination can be achieved by reading Kant’s aesthetic theory in expressivist terms. The resulting view is a form of quasi-realism about beauty. The position has its merits, but cannot ultimately explain the phenomena which motivate it. This conclusion generalises to quasi-realism about other matters. (shrink)

The main concepts of the free energy (FE) neuroscience developed by Karl Friston and colleagues parallel those of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology. In Hobson et al. ( 2014 ) these include an innate virtual reality generator that produces the fictive prior beliefs that Freud described as the primary process. This enables Friston's account to encompass a unified treatment—a complexity theory—of the role of virtual reality in both dreaming and mental disorder. In both accounts the brain operates to minimize (...) FE aroused by sensory impingements—including interoceptive impingements that report compliance with biological imperatives—and constructs a representation/model of the causes of impingement that enables this minimization. In Friston's account (variational) FE equals complexity minus accuracy, and is minimized by increasing accuracy and decreasing complexity. Roughly the brain (or model) increases accuracy together with complexity in waking. This is mediated by consciousness-creating active inference—by which it explains sensory impingements in terms of perceptual experiences of their causes. In sleep it reduces complexity by processes that include both synaptic pruning and consciousness/virtual reality/dreaming in REM. The consciousness-creating active inference that effects complexity-reduction in REM dreaming must operate on FE-arousing data distinct from sensory impingement. The most relevant source is remembered arousals of emotion, both recent and remote, as processed in SWS and REM on “active systems” accounts of memory consolidation/reconsolidation. Freud describes these remembered arousals as condensed in the dreamwork for use in the conscious contents of dreams, and similar condensation can be seen in symptoms. Complexity partly reflects emotional conflict and trauma. This indicates that dreams and symptoms are both produced to reduce complexity in the form of potentially adverse (traumatic or conflicting) arousals of amygdala-related emotions. Mental disorder is thus caused by computational complexity together with mechanisms like synaptic pruning that have evolved for complexity-reduction; and important features of disorder can be understood in these terms. Details of the consilience among Freudian, systems consolidation, and complexity-reduction accounts appear clearly in the analysis of a single fragment of a dream, indicating also how complexity reduction proceeds by a process resembling Bayesian model selection. (shrink)

In _The Later Middle Ages,_ the third volume of his monumental _History of Political Ideas,_ Eric Voegelin continues his exploration of one of the most crucial periods in the history of political thought. Illuminating the great figures of the high Middle Ages, Voegelin traces the historical momentum of our modern world in the core evocative symbols that constituted medieval civilization. These symbols revolved around the enduring aspiration for the _sacrum imperium,_ the one order capable of embracing the transcendent and immanent, (...) the ecclesiastical and political, the divine and human. The story of the later Middle Ages is that of the "civilizational schism"—the movement in which not only the reality but the aspiration for the _sacrum imperium_ gradually disappeared and the unification of faith and reason dissolved. His recognition of this civilizational schism provides Voegelin with a unique perspective on medieval society. William of Ockham, Dante, Giles of Rome, and Marsilius of Padua all emerge in Voegelin's study as predecessors to modern thought; each turns to personal authority and intellectual analysis in an attempt to comprehend the loss of the _sacrum imperium_ as an authoritative ideal. Voegelin is further drawn into investigations that, despite insufficient attention by scholars, still bear relevance to the study of the later Middle Ages. The mysticism apparent in _Piers Plowman_ and the apocalyptic revolt of Cola di Rienzo are merely two reactions to the disintegration of wholeness. Yet the story of the later Middle Ages does not merely revolve around disintegration. Voegelin recognizes the emergence of the constitutional political tradition as the most positive development of this period. He is at his best when explaining the difference between the presence of a representative institution and the growth of communal consciousness. Voegelin's study of the English political pattern is matched only by his unique perspective on the German imperial zone, culminating in a fitting conclusion on Nicholas of Cusa—the one political thinker with the ability to evoke the unity of mankind beyond fragmentation. _The Later Middle Ages_ is at once a brilliant examination of the symbols that characterized medieval society and a remarkable predecessor to Voegelin's study of the modern world, beginning with the Renaissance and the Reformation. (shrink)

Background/purpose: Research from other disciplines demonstrates that ethical position, idealism, or relativism predicts ethical decision-making. Individuals from diverse cultures ascribe to various religious beliefs and studies have found that religiosity and culture affect ethical decision-making. Moreover, little literature exists regarding undergraduate nursing students’ ethical position; no studies have been conducted in the United States on students’ ethical position, their self-identified culture, and intrinsic religiosity despite an increase in the diversity of nursing students across the United States. Participants and Research Context (...) Objectives: The study’s two aims were to determine the relationship of self-identified culture, religiosity, and ethics position of undergraduate nursing student and whether students’ level of education and past ethics courses taken related to idealism. Two hundred and twelve volunteer undergraduate students participated. Research design: A descriptive cross-sectional study was designed for participants who completed the Ethical Position Questionnaire, The intrinsic subscale of the Religious Orientation Scale, and a Demographic, Cultural, Ethnicity Form. To test the five hypotheses, analyses included t-tests, correlations, and ANOVA. Ethical Considerations: The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Adelphi University. Results: Idealism and intrinsic religiosity were significantly related. Differences were observed for intrinsic religiosity and idealism for cultural identity and cultural dimensions such as parents’ place of birth, and if participants were US born. Students’ level of education or participation in past courses on ethics did not influence idealism. Conclusions: The study’s findings were similar to most of the research from other disciplines on culture, ethics position, and religiosity. Generic courses on ethics taken prior to clinical work may not assist nursing students in integrating principles into complex ethical dilemmas. Self-identified culture, religion, and intrinsic religiosity related to ethics position; completing ethics courses and level of education, juniors compared with seniors, did not influence idealism. Faculty should consider integrating students’ culture, religious orientation, and ethics position into teaching ethics for all levels of nursing education. (shrink)

Philosophers are increasingly coming to recognize the importance of Freudian theory for the understanding of the mind. The picture Freud presents of the mind's growth and organization holds implications not just for such perennial questions as the relation of mind and body, the nature of memory and personal identity, the interplay of cognitive and affective processes in reasoning and acting, but also for the very way in which these questions are conceived and an interpretation of the mind is sought. This (...) volume of essays, by some of today's leading philosophers, explores all these topics, as well as the methods, results and status of the theory itself, while two 'classical' discussions by Wittgenstein and Sartre are also included. A number of the contributions – those by Donald Davidson, W. D. Hart, Jim Hopkins, Adam Morton, David Pears and Richard Wollheim – have not been published before, and a very useful bibliography is provided. It is an anthology that will be vital to anyone interested in Freudian theory and, more generally, in philosophical psychology. (shrink)

This paper argues that an account of picturing in terms of the experience it sustains, in particular an experience of resemblance in outline shape, is superior to Dominic Lopes’, view, on which pictures engage our recognitional capacities for the objects they depict. Lopes’ position fails to do the work proper to a philosophical theory of picturing. Lopes argues that the experienced resemblance view pays insufficient attention to empirical work, and that it incurs unwelcome empirical commitments. I refuse the commitments Lopes (...) offers, and suggest that the view is more open to the empirical than he thinks. (shrink)

Although dualism has the advantage of being intuitively plausible, it is not compatible with a 21st-century (scientific) world view. Jaak Panksepp and Antonio Damasio are contemporary writers who reject dualism, and whose views take the form of “biological naturalism”. I first discuss how their views compare in five specific respects; and then I look more closely at how the different emphases of the views affect their ability to account for the evolutionary advantages of consciousness, specifically. Both authors agree that “consciousness” (...) provides creatures with a survival advantage in terms of their ability to produce novel and/or flexible responses, their ability to plan ahead, and their motivation to promote their own survival – but the exact means by which they think these advantages are conferred, in each of these respects, differ. One might say that, whereas Damasio thinks the main evolutionary advantages of “consciousness” (the “higher reaches” of which are unique to humans) have to do with enabling creatures to work out what to do to promote their well-being, Panksepp thinks the main advantage of “consciousness” is that being “conscious” of affective feelings urgently motivates creatures to take action when their well-being is threatened. Considering that “working out what do” is only possible for a small selection of cognitively sophisticated organisms, I argue that Panksepp’s account is more plausible than Damasio’s account. (shrink)

Buddhisms and Deconstructions considers the connection between Buddhism and Derridean deconstruction, focusing on the work of Robert Magliola. Fourteen distinguished contributors discuss deconstruction and various Buddhisms—Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese —followed by an afterword in which Magliola responds directly to his critics.

Edited by Richard Grusin of the Center for 21st Century Studies, this is the first book to name and characterize—and therefore consolidate—a wide array of current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences under the concept of the nonhuman turn. Each of these approaches is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman, understood by contributors in a variety of ways—in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and geophysical (...) systems. The nonhuman turn in twenty-first-century studies can be traced to multiple intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the twentieth century: actor-network theory, affect theory, animal studies, assemblage theory, cognitive sciences, new materialism, new media theory, speculative realism, and systems theory. Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their assumptions, objects, and methodologies. However, they all take up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of twenty-first-century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Unlike the posthuman turn, the nonhuman turn does not make a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman. Rather, the nonhuman turn insists (paraphrasing Bruno Latour) that “we have never been human,” that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman—and that the human is identified precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman. Contributors: Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins U; Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown U; Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke U; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Brian Massumi, U of Montreal; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana U. (shrink)

This book examines from different perspectives the moral significance of non-human members of the biotic community and their omission from climate ethics literature. The complexity of life in an age of rapid climate change demands the development of moral frameworks that recognize and respect the dignity and agency of both human and non-human organisms. Despite decades of careful work in non-anthropocentric approaches to environmental ethics, recent anthologies on climate ethics have largely omitted non-anthropocentric approaches. This multidisciplinary volume of international scholars (...) tackles this lacuna by presenting novel work on non-anthropocentric approaches to climate ethics. Written in an accessible style, the text incorporates sentiocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric perspectives on climate change. With diverse perspectives from both leading and emerging scholars of environmental ethics, geography, religious studies, conservation ecology, and environmental studies, this book will offer a valuable reading for students and scholars of these fields. (shrink)

Examines the moral obligations of psychology. An inquiry into the main priorities of academic and professional psychology suggests that contributions to human welfare, its preeminent moral obligation, comes in third after guild issues and professional self-interest, and the pursuit of knowledge. In an effort to reassign moral philosophy a place of prominence and to broaden the ethical discourse of psychology, the authors use the term "moral imperative" . The promotion of the MI entails the exploration of 3 fundamental questions. These (...) concern the extent that the present social order promotes human welfare for everyone, the extent that psychology supports or challenges the present social order, and the contributions that psychology can make to the advent of the "good" society. The MI advances 4 human agency values: self-determination, distributive justice, collaborative and democratic participation, and relationality. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Why does cinema exert such power over our emotions? Many have wanted to answer by appeal to the idea that film sustains some illusion concerning the events it narrates. I compare three such views: that film sustains the illusion that those events are before us; that it sustains that illusion, but only partially; and that, though viewers are always fully aware of seeing pictures, those pictures are experienced as the moving photographic record of the narrated events. I identify these positions’ (...) successes and failures in explaining film’s emotional power, and various ways in which the issue between them might be tested further. (shrink)

Fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) comprise a large family of developmental and physiological signaling molecules. All FGFs have a high affinity for the glycosaminoglycan heparin and for cell surface heparan sulfate proteoglycans. A large body of biochemical and cellular evidence points to a direct role for heparin/heparan sulfate in the formation of an active FGF/FGF receptor signaling complex. However, until recently there has been no direct demonstration that heparan is required for the biological activity of FGF in a developmental system in (...) vivo. A recent paper by Lin et al.(1) has broken through this barrier to demonstrate that heparan sulfate is essential for FGF function during Drosophila development. The establishment of a role for heparan sulfate in FGFR activation in vivo suggests that tissue-specific differences in the structure of heparan may modulate the activity of FGF. BioEssays 22:108–112, 2000. ©2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The sequence from ideal state to tyran I ny contained in Books VIII-IX of the Republic constitutes neither history nor philosophy of history, but rather completes Plato's overall theory of politics, dealing, like every theoretical science, with simplified or pure cases, and narrated purely for dramatic effort. Popper's view that Plato was fundamentally an historicist is incorrect. Plato makes no straightforward comments on philosophy of history. Perhaps, like many Greeks, he surveyed history pessimistically, but he did not propound an iron (...) law of decay. As a social scientist Plato held that there are laws of political change without supposing the course of history is unalterably fixed. (shrink)