Health care and public health programs increasingly rely on, and often even require, organizational action, which is facilitated, if not dependent on, trust. Case examples in this essay highlight trust, trustworthiness, and distrust in public and private organizations, providing insights into how trust in health‐related organizations can be betrayed, earned, and justified and into the consequences of organizational trust and trustworthiness for the health of individuals and communities. These examples demonstrate the need for holistic assessments of trust in clinicians and (...) trust in organizations and for organizations, public health, and the medical profession to address questions concerning their own trustworthiness. Normative and empirical assessments of trust and trustworthiness that capture the experiences of those treated within the walls of a health care organization, as well as the care of those outside, will contribute to more trustworthy systems of care. (shrink)

Objective Analyze racial differences in comfort with medical research using an alternative to the traditional approach that treats white people as a raceless norm.Methods Quantitative analysis of survey responses (n = 1,570) from Black and white residents of the US to identify relationships between perceptions of research as a right or a risk, and comfort participating in medical research.Results A lower proportion of white respondents reported that medical experimentation occurred without patient consent (p < 0.001) and a higher proportion of (...) white respondents reported that it should be their right to participate in medical research (p = 0.02). Belief in one’s right to participate was significantly predictive of comfort (b = 0.37, p < 0.001). Belief in experimentation without consent was significantly predictive of comfort for white respondents but not for Black respondents in multivariable analysis.Conclusions A rights-based orientation and less concern about the risks of medical research among white respondents demonstrate comparative advantage. Efforts to diversify medical research may perpetuate structural racism if they do not (1) critically engage with whiteness and its role in comfort with participation, and (2) identify and respond specifically to the needs of Black patients. (shrink)

Mark Platts is responsible for the first systematic presentation of truth-conditional semantics and for turning a generation of philosophers on to the Davidsonian program. He is also a pioneer in discussions of moral realism, and has made important contributions to bioethics, the philosophy of human rights and moral responsibility. This book is a tribute to Platts's pioneering work in these areas, featuring contributions from number of leading scholars of his work from the US, UK and Mexico. It features replies to (...) the individual essays from Platts, as well as a concluding chapter reflecting on his philosophical career from Oxford to Mexico City. Mind, Language and Morality will be of interest to philosophers across a wide range of areas, including ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of law, and philosophy of language. (shrink)

By coincidence, it seems, the critical vocabulary and concerns that came to be known as postcolonial theory and methodology rose to be a dominant school of inquiry in the Anglo-American academy in the same years that the Soviet Union collapsed (notwithstanding that key theoretical texts by Frantz Fanon and others predated this moment by decades). Yet, oddly, postcolonialist terms were seldom applied to postsocialist and post-Soviet cases until the 2000s, and they have become more broadly utilized in these territories only (...) in the past decade. Further, it must be admitted that few results of these applications of postcolonial tools to postsocialist cases have made much of a mark among broader circles of postcolonial scholars and thinkers. Djagalov's book may help to correct this situation. Rather than work in the mode of “application”—applying a postcolonial framework to yet one more case—Djagalov reconstructs the history of a century of socialist anti-imperialism, as it was expressed in global cultural institutions and networks, and in so doing discovers the ignored or forgotten genealogy that links contemporary postcolonial thought to writers, activists, and theoreticians of the socialist world.Djagalov's book toggles between, on the one hand, chapters of institutional history that chronicle the global cultural institutions (such as the Afro-Asian Writers Association, the Tashkent Film Festival, and the Lotus Prize) that connected the Soviet Union with decolonizing countries and, on the other hand, chapters of synthetic cultural criticism that articulate typological analyses of common narrative forms that circulated in the fiction and film of the socialist world—recurring varieties of “solidarity narratives,” as Djagalov calls them. His work reveals how central the state-socialist political imaginary was for writers and filmmakers ranging from Nâzım Hikmet to Ngūgī wa Thiong'o, and how prominent their itineraries through Soviet institutions and networks were in their biographies. Ngūgī, for instance, finished his 1977 novel Petals of Blood during a residency in the Soviet Writers House in Yalta.In recovering the lost continent of anti-imperial socialist globality that bridged the “second” and “third worlds,” Djagalov has demonstrated not how postcolonial terms can be applied to postsocialist cases but how postcolonial theory and method are themselves postsocialist phenomena. Djagalov does not attempt to rectify the state-socialist prehistory of postcolonial thought with a critique of Soviet imperial habits or of the postcolonial contexts of contemporary Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. At least, though, the challenges of thinking “postcolonial” and “postsocialist” together have now become clearer. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism leaves us with new research problems: what, for example, does it mean to be a postcolony of an anti-imperial empire? (shrink)

David Platt believes that it may be religiously important to see God's existence as contingent. That there might have been nothing whatsoever, even though we find this conceptually impossible, points up God's contingency. The book discusses how the demands of religious adequacy may be met without recourse to divine necessity. The free gift of experience is rich with religious significance in a world without why. This probing and gentle book maintains that realization of the fragility of existence should also (...) change our domineering attitudes towards the environment. (shrink)

Dr Platt begins by examining the reformist credentials of More that he shared with other humanists, particularly Colet and Erasmus. The humanist desire to draw from the fountain-source is explored and the need for Greek scholarship is identified as a key factor in scriptural interpretation. Finally, Dr. Platt investigates the dilemmas the humanists faced as the Protestant Reformation began to emerge in early 16th century Europe.

This second edition of the book contains a new chapter on the notions of natural-kind words and natural kinds.

Heracles had gone to Arcadia to fetch the Erymanthian boar; when he had just returned he heard of the voyage of Argo, and, hastily depositing the boar at Mycenae, departed to join Jason without the knowledge of Eurystheus. λυρκήιον Αργος άμείψας is supposed to mean ‘having come to Lyrceian Argos’. But, first, άμείβω Αργος ought not to mean ‘I come to Argos’; άμείβω and άμείβομαι alike mean either change or pass or leave; enter they do not mean. The lexica quote (...) passages as meaning enter which do not mean any such thing; Θύρας or βαλόν άμείβω is ‘I pass’ the door or threshold, πόλιν έκπόλεως άμείβω or άμείβομαι is ‘I change one city for another,’ άμείβομαι έρκοςόδότων ‘I pass the hedge of the teeth,’ and so on. Until I see an instance of it I shall not believe that πόλιν άμείβω can mean merely I enter or come to a city. Nor can we take it to mean pass in this place, because the road from Arcadia to Mycenae does not pass Argos. Secondly, what is Lyrceian Argos ? Whether a river or a mountain be implied by Lyrceian, it is not a Greek expression; we do not speak of Hymettian Athens or Cephisian Athens, of Cithaeronian or Asopian Thebes or Boeotia. There is indeed found the expression Πηλιωτιν 'Ιωλκόν in Euripides, Medea 484, and the scholiast on iv. 131 says that Τιτνίδος Αίης means Aea of the river Titen, referring to Eratosthenes as his authority for the river, but no one else knows anything about it, and it is more than probable that Mr. Mooney is right in regarding it with suspicion. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION This investigation seeks to make a modest contribution to the debate on the changes which took place in Reformed theology in the ...

The papers in this collection discuss the central questions about the connections between language, reality and human understanding. The complex relations between accounts of meaning and facts about ordinary speakers’ understanding of their language are examined so as to illuminate the philosophical character of the connections between language and reality. The collection as a whole is a thematically unified treatment of some of the most central questions within contemporary philosophy of language.

Sandrine Roux's L'Empreinte cartésienne addresses what she describes as one of the "persistent problems" in philosophy, namely, the mind-body problem raised by Descartes's substance dualism. Her book carefully lays out the various puzzles, both real and perceived, raised by Descartes's theory of humans as a mind-body union. She distinguishes clearly between the way these problems are understood by Descartes, and the way they were seen by some of his seventeenth-century followers, especially the occasionalists, Louis de La Forge, Géraud de Cordemoy, (...) and Malebranche. And she tries to orient the Cartesian mind-body problem with respect to theories in contemporary philosophy of mind.The first two parts are... (shrink)

"The French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche popularized the doctrine of occasionalism in the late seventeenth century. Occasionalism is the thesis that God alone is the true cause of everything that happens in the world, and created substances are merely "occasional causes." This doctrine was originally developed in medieval Islamic theology, and was widely rejected in the works of Christian authors in medieval Europe. Yet despite its heterodoxy, occasionalism was revived starting in the 1660s by French and Dutch followers of the philosophy (...) of René Descartes. Since the 1970s, there has been a growing body of literature on Malebranche and occasionalism. There has also been new work on the Cartesian occasionalists before Malebranche - including Arnold Geulincx, Geraud de Cordemoy and Louis de la Forge. But to date there has not been a systematic, book-length study of the reasoning that led Cartesian thinkers to adopt occasionalism, and the relationship of their arguments to Descartes' own views. This book expands on recent scholarship, to provide the first comprehensive account of seventeenth century occasionalism. Part I contrasts occasionalism with a theory of divine providence developed by Thomas Aquinas, in response to medieval occasionalists; it shows that Descartes' philosophy is compatible with Aquinas' theory, on which God "concurs" in all the actions of created beings. Part 2 reconstructs the arguments of Cartesians - such as Cordemoy and a Forge - who used Cartesian physics to argue for occasionalism. Finally, it shows how Malebranche's case for occasionalism combines philosophical theology with Cartesian metaphysics and mechanistic science"--. (shrink)