The featured case discussion on the role of consent and individual autonomy in the PIP breast implant scandal raises interesting and important questions regarding the right of patients (and individuals in general) to decide whether to have their personal data included in medical registries and used for research. The fate of the National Breast Implant Registry, following the introduction of a policy that demanded formally recorded informed consent, is particularly enlightening. Combined with the (ex post) fact that reliable and comprehensive (...) data would have been useful in this specific case, it clearly illustrates the dangers of overemphasizing individual autonomy in observational research. The issue is timely, as the European Commission has recently proposed a new Data Protection Regulation (European Commission, 2012) that may have serious implications for registry based research. In this commentary, I will first discuss two aspects of the regulatory framework that arguably contribute to the problematic situation and then offer an alternative view on why requiring consent should not be the default position in this kind of research. (shrink)

Our starting point in this article is the debate between John Harris and Iain Brassington on whether or not there is a duty to take part in scientific research. We consider the arguments that have been put forward based on fairness and a duty to rescue, and suggest an alternative justification grounded in a hypothetical agreement: that is, because effective healthcare cannot be taken for granted, but requires continuous medical research, and nobody knows what kind of healthcare they will need, (...) participating in research should be viewed from the perspective of a social contract, based on our mutual need for medical advances. (shrink)

In this commentary on ‘Why participating in scientific research is a moral duty’, I take issue with a number of Stjernschantz Forsberg et al's claims. Though abiding by the terms of a contract might be obligatory, this won't show that those terms themselves indicate a duty—even allowing that there's a contract to begin with. Meanwhile, though we might have reasons to participate, not all reasons are moral reasons, and the paper does not establish that the reasons here are (...) moral in character. (shrink)

Numerous authors indicate that the influence of academic education extends beyond the growth of specialized knowledge gained by the graduates. Scholars are trying to identify and examine the potential impact of higher learning on students’ attitudes and choices. One of the dimensions considered by the researchers is the effect of university training on students’ moral choices. Our paper attempts to identify differences between the students’ declared moral choices and their majors (fields of studies). Working with a sample of university students (...) of Economics and Sociology (N = 181), and using three variants of the Trolley Problem, the subjects’ responses are used to identify the similarities and differences between their choices. The participants were asked to respond to three hypothetical situations regarding a runaway trolley. Their decision in the first scenario could save a person’s life or let her be run over by the trolley. In the second scenario, their decision could either let one person die and save five lives or save one life and let five people be killed. These two scenarios required pulling a lever to switch the trolley from one track to another. The third scenario requires pushing an obese person in front of the runaway trolley to stop it from killing five persons. As expected, we found a significant difference between the two groups (the economists and the sociologists) in the case of our third scenario, however, we found no evidence supporting the indoctrination hypothesis. We conclude that the existing differences between the choices made by the future economists and sociologists may support the preselection hypothesis. (shrink)

The bioeconomy is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and scholarly literature, but critical examination of the concept is lacking. We argue that the bioeconomy should be understood as a political project, not simply or primarily as a technoscientific or economic one. We use a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi to elucidate the politically performative nature of the bioeconomy through an analysis of an influential Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development initiative, The Bioeconomy to 2030. We argue (...) that this initiative is a response to some of the most acute challenges facing the current neoliberal-capitalist accumulation regime, which seeks to protect and extend that regime, through both what it occludes and what it promotes. Rather than taking the bioeconomy as a description of some subset of economic activity, we regard it as a promissory construct that is meant to induce and facilitate some actions while deterring others; most explicitly, it is meant to bring about a particular set of political–institutional changes that will shape the parameters of possible future action. The bioeconomy concept highlights the potential dangers of failing to situate ethnographic examinations of horizontal micro-relations within a political–economic macro-context that enables and constrains. Scholarly work in science and technology studies and elsewhere that does not recognize the wider politics of the bioeconomy risks unintentionally contributing to the legitimation of this political project. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 6, Page 935-948, December 2021.

This entry summarizes an emerging subdiscipline of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy (“x-phi”) which has variously been referred to as experimental philosophical bioethics, experimental bioethics, or simply “bioxphi”. Like empirical bioethics, bioxphi uses data-driven research methods to capture what various stakeholders think (feel, judge, etc.) about moral issues of relevance to bioethics. However, like its other parent discipline of x-phi, bioxphi tends to favor experiment-based designs drawn from the cognitive sciences – including psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics – to (...) tease out why and how stakeholders think as they do. (shrink)

Electrotherapy is a dynamically developing method of treatment of sinus node dysfunction and atrioventricular conduction disturbances. It is an extremely important method used in the treatment of heart failure. The aim of this paper was to use classification trees for the differentiation between patients implanted with one of the three electrotherapy devices, i.e. SC-VVI/aai, DC-DDD, ICD/crt. The analysed data concerned 2071 patients who underwent implantation or device replacement procedures in the years 2010–2018, hospitalized in a coronary care unit. CART-type classification (...) trees with 5-fold cross-validation were used for the analysis. The decision concerning the choice of a particular electrotherapy device is always made based on the latest guidelines and the patient’s clinical condition. The used classification trees may enable verification of the state of implementation of guidelines in real-life therapeutic decisions. (shrink)

Timeless Radcliffe: A Review of Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic - Tomasz Fisiak Yeats’s Genres and Tensions: A Review of Charles I. Armstrong’s Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History - Wit Pietrzak Review of Anna Pochmara’s The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance - Antoni Górny “Artful Exaggeration” - Krzysztof Majer Interviews Bill Gaston Transcultural Theatre in the UK - Uilleam Blacker Talks to Joanna Kosmalska.

In this issue, our contributors demonstrate how art in the city, art “about” the city, art compared to the city, can bring to attention the insidious forces underlying every city’s gleaming, wide-awake veneer.

We are grateful to the commentators for their close reading of our article 1 and for their challenging and interesting responses to it. We do not have space to respond to all of the objections that they raise, so in this reply, we address only a selection of them. Some commentaries question the usefulness of developing an account of the sort we provide, 2 or of revising the Standard Account (SA) in doing so. 3–5 Our schema is intended to provide (...) a framework for developing a full account of invasiveness that captures existing uses of the term. On the assumption that the term is used somewhat reliably and consistently–and we are inclined to agree with some of our commentators 3 4 that people are not terribly confused or mistaken in how they employ the term–an account that captures these... (shrink)

Children’s linguistic and social skills develop through play with siblings, but there is little research into sibling interaction using naturally occurring data. This conversation analytic case study presents an evidence-based account of how an older sibling responds to verbal challenges from her younger sibling during free play at home. The older sibling employs prosodic, rhetorical and linguistic devices to deflect challenges while avoiding conflict. She does this by acknowledging the grounds of the challenge, before invoking privileged information or epistemic differences (...) to reject it. Structurally, the older sibling inserts extended digressions which obfuscate challenges by engaging the challenger and switching topic. These phenomena blur the traditional accept/reject response dichotomy. The findings provide insight into the complexity of a 5-/6-year-old’s challenge-defence strategies and highlight the importance of face preservation and mitigation of disagreement. We propose that the ability to respond to challenges while maintaining intersubjectivity is a component of communicative competence. (shrink)

Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform is an invaluable resource for policymakers, faculty, students, and anyone interested in how decisions made about the education system ultimately affect the quality of education, educational access, and social justice.

Different forms of mindfulness meditation are increasingly integrated in the clinical practice in the last three decades. Previous studies have identified changes in the neurophysiology and neurochemistry of the brain resulting from different mindfulness meditation practices in the general population. However, research on neural correlates of different types of meditation, particularly on the clinical outcomes, is still very sparse. Therefore, the aim of this article is to review the neural impact of mindfulness meditation interventions on different mental disorders via the (...) classification of main components of mindfulness meditation. The clearer classification of mindfulness meditation may inform future clinical practice and research directions. (shrink)

W artykule zwracam uwagę na trudności jakie napotyka ktoś, kto chce wcielać w życie postulaty krytycyzmu dotyczące precyzji językowej. Zgodnie z tymi postulatami powinno się mówić jednoznacznie i precyzyjnie, a zatem unikać wyrażeń wieloznacznych, nieostrych i chwiejnych znaczeniowo. Jednakże postulaty te jest znacznie trudniej spełnić niż mogłoby się wydawać, bowiem istotne wątpliwości dotyczą samych zjawisk niejasności, nieostrości czy wieloznaczności. Wydaje się, że chcąc nauczyć innych unikania na przykład wypowiedzi wieloznacznych, powinniśmy dysponować adekwatną charakterystyką wieloznaczności i potrafić ją właściwie diagnozować. Tymczasem, (...) sytuacja jest niesamowicie zagmatwana i w literaturze czy to filozoficznej, czy językoznawczej, nie ma jednej ustalonej definicji, czy choćby zgody co do tego, które wyrażenia są wieloznaczne. Nie ma także zgody co do tego, w jaki sposób charakteryzować polisemię i jak odróżniać ją np. od zależności kontekstowej. Wątpliwości budzi także charakterystyka nieostrości i właściwego klasyfikowania przypadków granicznych wyrażeń nieostrych. Nie ma natomiast wątpliwości, że większość wyrażeń języka naturalnego jest i nieostra, i zależna od kontekstu, i jednocześnie polisemiczna. Co więcej w wielu wypadkach te cechy wcale nie są defektami naszego języka, a wręcz usprawniają komunikację i umożliwiają nam szybkie przekazanie treści. Postulat unikania tego rodzaju wyrażeń jest po prostu nierealizowalny. Kierowanie się zasadami krytycyzmu pozwala jednak na łatwiejsze dostrzeżenie i unikanie wadliwości i uchybień wobec poprawności językowej w tych sytuacjach, gdy takie wadliwości utrudniają sprawną komunikację. (shrink)

Niezdaniowe akty mowy to przynajmniej pozornie niezdaniowe wypowiedzi, za których pomocą mówiący dokonują pewnych aktów illokucyjnych: stwierdzają, pytają, proszą itp. Wśród teoretyków zajmujących się takimi wypowiedziami można wskazać zwolenników podejścia, które głosi, że większość takich wypowiedzi tojednak — wbrew pozorom — wypowiedzi zdaniowe (elipsy), oraz zwolenników stanowiska, zgodnie z którym treść takich wypowiedzi musi być bezpośrednio wzbogacona z kontekstu za pomocą procesów pragmatycznych niekontrolowanych semantycznie. W pierwszej części tej pracy przyglądam się bliżej stanowisku traktującemu wypowiedzi niezdaniowe jako elipsy i zastanowiam (...) się, czy można uznać, że kontekst pozajęzy- kowy może wyznaczać sposób uzupełnienia wyrażenia do pełnego zdania w taki sposób, że pierwotna wypowiedź niezdaniowa może być uznana za elipsę. Następnie przedstawiam stanowisko, zgodnie z którym wypowiedzi niezdaniowe to udane akty illokucyjne niewymagające wzbogacenia pragmatycznego. Argumentuję, że taki pogląd nie jest adekwatny, ponieważ na jego gruncie wypowiedzi niezdaniowych nie można uznać za pełnoprawne akty mowy. W dalszej części pracy proponuję wersję stanowiska pragmatycznego, opartą na relatywizmie umiarkowanym Franęois Recanatiego. Proponowana przeze mnie koncepcja pozwala uznać, że mimo iż wypowiedzi niezdaniowe semantycznie nie wyrażają sądów i nie mają wartości logicznej, to po odpowiednim wzbogaceniu z kontekstu pozajęzykowego mają na tyle określoną treść (i moc), że mogą być uznane za udane akty illokucyjne. Koncepcja ta pozwala również odpowiedzieć na zarzut ze zgodności gramatycznej, który jest jednym z najpoważniejszych zarzutów, z jakimi muszą się zmierzyć wszystkie koncepcje pragmatyczne. (shrink)

This is part 2 of an interview with Prof. J. Conant, conducted by Niklas Forsberg.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nordic Wittgenstein Review Jahrgang: 2 Heft: 1 Seiten: 131-160.

In a recent paper Mandy Simons has argued that in a Gricean framework there is room for embedded pragmatic effects. One of her goals has been to demonstrate that an argument put forward by François Recanati to the effect that it is not possible to apply Gricean reasoning to generation of local pragmatic effects is mistaken. In his commentary Recanati maintains that the view suggested by Simons can be called Gricean only in a very broad sense and insists that the (...) process responsible for local effects is essentially different from the one which generates conversational implicatures. In my view their exchange highlights important issues concerning the way in which local pragmatic effects are generated and is worthy of a careful analysis. In what follows I critically examine Simons’s and Recanati’s views and then suggest the view that in the light of this analysis seems to me the most adequate. In particular, I argue—against Recanati—that during the interpretation process interpreters construct literal propositional nuclei, which usually fell short of being truth-evaluable but which play an important role in the interpretation. I claim that the view that assumes that such literal propositions are constructed in the process of interpretation is more universal and may be used to analyse a wider range of examples than the view that does not postulate such constructions. Nevertheless, I maintain—against Simons—that the global and local pragmatic inferences are importantly different. (shrink)

This is part 2 och an interview with Prof. J. Conant, conducted by Niklas Forsberg. This article will be published at the end of June 2016.

This document presents the Bonn PRINTEGER Consensus Statement: Working with Research Integrity—Guidance for research performing organisations. The aim of the statement is to complement existing instruments by focusing specifically on institutional responsibilities for strengthening integrity. It takes into account the daily challenges and organisational contexts of most researchers. The statement intends to make research integrity challenges recognisable from the work-floor perspective, providing concrete advice on organisational measures to strengthen integrity. The statement, which was concluded February 7th 2018, provides guidance on (...) the following key issues: § 1.Providing information about research integrity § 2.Providing education, training and mentoring § 3.Strengthening a research integrity culture § 4.Facilitating open dialogue § 5.Wise incentive management § 6.Implementing quality assurance procedures § 7.Improving the work environment and work satisfaction § 8.Increasing transparency of misconduct cases § 9.Opening up research § 10.Implementing safe and effective whistle-blowing channels § 11.Protecting the alleged perpetrators § 12.Establishing a research integrity committee and appointing an ombudsperson § 13.Making explicit the applicable standards for research integrity. (shrink)

We engage with the nature and the value of achievement through a critical examination of an argument according to which biomedical “enhancement” of our capacities is impermissible because enhancing ourselves in this way would threaten our achievements. We call this the argument against enhancement from achievement. We assess three versions of it, each admitting to a strong or a weak reading. We argue that strong readings fail, and that weak readings, while in some cases successful in showing that enhancement interferes (...) with the nature or value of achievement, fail to establish that enhancement poses an unusual threat to achievement. (shrink)

Language Lost and Found takes as its starting-point Iris Murdoch's claim that "we have suffered a general loss of concepts." By means of a thorough reading of Iris Murdoch's philosophy in the light of this difficulty, it offers a detailed examination of the problem of linguistic community and the roots of the thought that some philosophical problems arise due to our having lost the sense of our own language. But it is also a call for a radical reconsideration of how (...) philosophy and literature relate to each other on a general level and in Murdoch's authorship in particular. (shrink)

Sex offenders are sometimes offered or required to undergo pharmacological interventions intended to diminish their sex drive (anti-libidinal interventions or ALIs). In this paper, we argue that much of the debate regarding the moral permissibility of ALIs has been founded on an inaccurate assumption regarding their intended purpose—namely, that ALIs are intended solely to realise medical purposes, not correctional goals. This assumption has made it plausible to assert that ALIs may only permissibly be administered to offenders with their valid consent, (...) in line with the approach taken to most other interventions with a medical aim. However, we argue that, contrary to this assumption, the state's intention in relation to at least some ALIs is, at least in part, to achieve correctional objectives. We evaluate two legal regimes for ALI provision—section 645 of the California Penal Code and the mental health regime in England and Wales. In each case, we identify the state's implicit purpose in imposing ALIs and argue that the Californian and English regimes both serve as counterexamples to the view that ALIs are intended solely for medical purposes. While the moral implications of our argument are not straightforward, it raises the question whether consent is required for permissible imposition of ALIs, and more generally, whether the moral permissibility of crime-preventing interventions using medical means should be assessed against the standards of medical ethics or against those of criminal justice ethics. (shrink)

This editorial presents the background for the article collection ‘ELSA and RRI’. It sets the stage for the topics discussed in the collection and briefly presents the different contributions. It concludes by opening up for continued discussion of the relations between ELSA and RRI.

This article discusses outcomes of a dialogue conference on ‘The road ahead for ELSA in Norway: Issues of quality, influence and network cooperation’ held in Oslo in December 2012. Norwegian researchers in the field of ethical, legal and social aspects of technologies were invited to discuss conceptual and strategic issues, as well as the setup of a researcher network. In the article I take an institutionalist approach and discuss challenges in institutionalising an ELSA network at a time when a designated (...) ELSA funding programme is coming to an end. The research question is how the Norwegian ELSA network can succeed as a persistent network in times of greater uncertainties. The article claims that the network needs to gain legitimacy, outlines different dimensions of legitimacy and interprets the conference discussions in light of these dimensions. Central challenges and success factors facing the ELSA network are discussed and the article concludes with reflections on the potential future of ELSA in Norway. Although the article has a Norwegian context, the discussions in the article are likely to be relevant for researchers all across Europe, as similar developments are taking place also elsewhere in the European research funding context. (shrink)

Nanotechnology will allegedly have a revolutionary impact in a wide range of fields, but has also created novel concerns about health, safety and the environment (HSE). Nanotechnology regulation has nevertheless lagged behind nanotechnology development. In 2004 the International Organization for Standardization established a technical committee for producing nanotechnology standards for terminology, measurements, HSE issues and product specifications. These standards are meant to play a role in nanotechnology development, as well as in national and international nanotechnology regulation, and will therefore have (...) consequences for consumers, workers and the environment. This paper gives an overview of the work in the technical committee on nanotechnology and discusses some challenges with regard to legitimacy in such work. The paper focuses particularly on stakeholder involvement and the potential problems of scientific robustness when standardising in such early stages of the scientific development. The intention of the paper is to raise some important issues rather than to draw strong conclusions. However, the paper will be concluded with some suggestions for improving legitimacy in the TC 229 and a call for increased public awareness about standardisation in the field of nanotechnology. (shrink)

Liberal societies are characterized by respect for a fundamental value pluralism; i.e., respect for individuals’ rights to live by their own conception of the good. Still, the state must make decisions that privilege some values at the cost of others. When public ethics committees give substantial ethical advice on policy related issues, it is therefore important that this advice is well justified. The use of explicit tools for ethical assessment can contribute to justifying advice. In this article, I will discuss (...) one approach to ethical assessment, the ethical matrix method. This method is a variant of intuitionist balancing. Intuitionism is characterized by stressing the existence of several (at least two) fundamental prima facie moral principles, between which there is no given rank order. For some intuitionist approaches, coherentism has been proposed as a model of justification. This article will discuss justification of ethical advice and evaluate the appropriateness of coherentism as a justificatory approach to intuitionist tools. (shrink)

Concerns have been voiced about the ethical implications of patenting practices in the field of biotechnology. Some of these have also been incorporated into regulation, such as the European Commission Directive 98/44 on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions. However, the incorporation of ethically based restrictions into patent legislation has not had the effect of satisfying all concerns. In this article, we will systematically compare the richness of ethical concerns surrounding biotech patenting, with the limited scope of ethical concerns actually (...) addressed in the patent system. As sources of our analyses we will use literature and document studies and a survey with important stakeholders and experts related to Norwegian patenting in the aquacultural biotechnology sector. We will structure the analyses with an ethical matrix, developed for this purpose. Showing the misalignment of the discussions within and outside the patent system, we suggest that an important reason for the ethical controversy still surrounding patenting is that ethical questions keep being framed in a narrow way within the system. Until a richer set of ethical considerations is addressed head-on within the patent system, the patent system will continue to evoke academic and interest group criticism, potentially contributing to a legitimacy crisis of the whole system. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics and Time:Lévinas Between Kant and HusserlJoanna Hodge (bio)This article stems from the conviction that the source of the bloody barbarism of National Socialism lies not in some contingent anomaly within human reasoning, nor in some accidental ideological misunderstanding. This article expresses the conviction that this source stems from the essential possibility of elemental evil into which we can be led by logic and against which Western philosophy had (...) not sufficiently insured itself. This possibility is inscribed within the ontology of a being concerned with being—a being, to use the Heideggerian expression, "which in its own being is concerned with that being." Such a possibility still threatens the subject correlative with being as gathering together and as dominating, that famous subject of transcendental idealism that before all else wishes to be free and thinks itself free. We must ask ourselves if liberalism is all we need to achieve the authentic dignity for the human subject. Does the subject ever arrive at the human condition prior to assuming responsibility for the other in the act of election that raises him up to this height? This election comes from a god—or God—who beholds him in the face of the other, the neighbour, the original "site" of the Revelation.—Emmanuel Lévinas, 28 March 1990, introduction to "Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism" (1934)1IntroductionThe intent of this essay is to establish the relevance of various divergent workings of time for an understanding of the difficulties distinctive of moral dilemmas and ethical doubt. It will introduce the thinking of Lévinas (1905-96) to bring into focus the differences entailed in addressing ethical contexts from various perspectives of time, whether in terms of past experience, present contingencies, or considerations of the future. It turns out to be necessary to distinguish between various conceptions of the future as well, in order to grasp the different construals of constraints on moral deliberation. A contrast may be drawn between the individualism and the collectivism, [End Page 107] respectively, of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's visions of the future;1 and between the religious determinacies of Lévinas's invocation of futurity and Derrida's more ascetic, formally indicative recasting of Lévinas's à-dieu.2 It is also the case that distinct conceptions of the past impose significant constraints on what human beings can hope to achieve in their moral efficacy. There is an important difference between the Greco-pagan past, invoked by Nietzsche and Heidegger, and the divine time of creation invoked in the opening pages of Genesis, which is the source of Lévinas's notion of an immemorial time, and which is subjected to deconstructive reading by Jacques Derrida in "The Animal Which Therefore I Am, to Be Continued" [see Derrida, "L'animal autobiographique"].I shall introduce a reading of the second part of Kant's treatise The Conflict of the Faculties (1798) [139-71], on the contest between philosophy and law, to suggest that for ethics, by contrast to concerns with aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology, a consideration of conceptions of futurity is especially pressing. This provides a context for responding to Lévinas's early article "Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism" (1934), to which Lévinas wrote an introduction, including my opening citation, some sixty years later.3 Lévinas is not simply engaging with the problem of evil, in relation to the now well-known moral deficiencies of Heidegger's fundamental ontology.4 He is also warning, more generally, against delusions arising from theoretical abstraction, in both absolute idealism and, indeed, in a Nietzschean ethics. His own writings, from Time and the Other (1947) on, suggest that the deficiency arises from oversimplifications [End Page 108] in the thinking of time. Taking this as a clue, the main tasks of this essay are to show that the broadly historical notion of time, which appears oriented toward the past, requires a complementary reflection on futurity, if the ethical significance of different ways of relating to the past is to emerge; and, in relation to that futurity, to show that the broadly teleological, future-directed notions of self-formation, deliberation, and genesis require supplementation... (shrink)

Over the last years, Norway has revised its animal welfare legislation. As of January 1, 2010, the Animal Protection Act of 1974 was replaced by a new Animal Welfare Act. This paper describes the developments in the normative structures from the old to the new act, as well as the main traits of the corresponding implementation and governance system. In the Animal Protection Act, the basic animal ethics principles were to avoid suffering, treat animals well, and consider their natural needs (...) and instincts. In addition, a principle for balancing our duties towards animals with the needs and interests of humans was expressed by the formulation unnecessary suffering. These principles (only with slightly different formulations) are retained in the new act. The novelty of the new act is shown by its explicit intention to promote respect for animals and its recognition of animals’ intrinsic value. Whereas intrinsic value is only given a symbolic function, the notion of respect is intended to have practical consequences. One interpretation of respect for animals is taking the animal’s integrity—and not only welfare—into account. Another is to see the introduction of respect as a call to animal keepers to provide animals with welfare exceeding the minimum requirements. In several respects, the legal system now seems to leave more responsibility to the individual animal keeper—and to citizens in general. I argue that if the authorities really do want to promote respect for animals, they must at the same time initiate activities to achieve this. In my perspective the challenge is to provide adequate measures to achieve in practice the intended respect for animals expressed in the new act. (shrink)

A number of factors-new research into human and animal consciousness, a heightened awareness of the methods and consequences of intensive farming, and modern concerns about animal welfare and ecology-have made our relationship to animals an area of burning interest in contemporary philosophy. Utilizing methods inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the contributors to this volume explore this area in a variety of ways. Topics discussed include: * scientific vs. non-scientific ways of describing human and animal behaviour * the ethics of eating particular (...) animal species * human nature, emotions, and instinctive reactions * responses of wonder towards the natural world * the moral relevance of literature * the concept of dignity * the question of whether non-human animals can use language This book will be of great value to anyone interested in philosophical and interdisciplinary issues concerning language, ethics and humanity's relation to animals and the natural world. (shrink)

Focusing on the penultimate chapter of Collingwood's An Essay on Philosophical Method, this paper offers a re-evaluation of several points in leading interpretations of his philosophy. It is argued that this chapter, 'Philosophy as a Branch of Literature', invites us to rethink the relation between a systematic or problem-oriented and an historical or exegetical philosophy; how linguistic analysis (particularly in the form of ordinary language philosophy) relates to the history of philosophy; and how the question of literature in philosophy is (...) not merely a question about literature, but of philosophy. In contrast to influential interpreters such as e.g. Connelly and D'Oro, it is here argued that Collingwood (a) offers a profound criticism of the idea that philosophical problems are eternal, (b) invites us to deepen our understanding of ordinary language philosophy aswell as (c) the idea of a therapeutic method in philosophy, and (d) problematizes the tendency to think that the question about the form philosophical writing takes is a secondary issue that can be side-stepped. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of J.L. Austin’s philosophy. It opens new ways of thinking about ethics and other contemporary issues in the wake of Austin’s philosophical work. -/- Austin is primarily viewed as a philosopher of language whose work focused on the pragmatic aspects of speech. His work on ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory is seen as his main contribution to philosophy. This book challenges this received view to show that Austin used his most well-known theoretical (...) notions as heuristic tools aimed at debunking the fact/value dichotomy. Additionally, it demonstrates that Austin’s continual returns to the ordinary is rooted in a desire to show that our lives in language are complicated and multifaceted. What emerges is an attempt to think with Austin about problems that are central to philosophy today—such as the question about linguistic inheritance, truth, the relationship between a language inherited and morality, and how we are to cope with linguistic elasticity and historicity. -/- Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on Austin’s philosophy, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy. -/- Table of Contents 1. Approaching Austin -/- 2. Approaching Language? -/- 3. Lessons from Sense and Sensibilia -/- 4. A Plea for Phenomenology: On Austin’s Method -/- 5. Testimony and Knowledge -/- 6. All the Locutions -/- 7. Our Word is Our Bond. (shrink)

In an article titled, "Who Shall Live When Not All Can?", James Childress proposes a system for allocating scarce lifesaving medical resources based on random selection procedures. Childress writes of random selection procedures, [They] "cannot be dismissed as a ‘non-rational’ and ‘non-human’... without an inquiry into the reasons, including human values which might justify it." My thesis is that once we concentrate on determining the rationality of random selection procedures, we will see that Childress's claim that we cannot dismiss such (...) procedures as ‘non-rational’ is open to question. My claim will be that while both random selection and social worth procedures are rationally defensible systems, random selection procedures easily lead to specific choices that are objectively irrational, apart from the limited perspective of the random selection process itself. Keywords: allocation, random selection, rationality, rational decision-making, scarce resources, social worth CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Drawing upon Aristotle’s claim that when one wants to learn right conduct or virtue, one should emulate those who practice it, this paper describes reasons for how the clear and conscious development of nursing role models can be used to model virtue theory in applied ethics courses. After providing a brief summary of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, the paper turns to a description of the basic models that describe the role of a nurse: surrogate mother, patient’s advocate, traditional caregiver, and trained (...) clinician. With these models in hand, the paper illustrates how virtues and duties can change when the role of the nurse changes and how different models of the nurse’s role connect virtue to practical action in different ways. Finally, the paper concludes with an extension of the above discussion to other areas of professional ethics and a step-by-step procedure for determining occupational duties. (shrink)