We read with great interest Garland, Morain and Sugarman’s manuscript on the obligations of clinicians to participate in pragmatic clinical trials (PCTs) (Garland, Morain and Sugarman 2023). We bel...

There is a growing body of literature that has sought to undermine systems of ethical regulation, and governance more generally, within the social sciences. In this paper, we argue that any general claim for a system of research ethics governance in social research depends on clarifying the nature of the stake that society has in research. We show that certain accounts of this stake—protecting researchers’ freedoms; ensuring accountability for resources; safeguarding welfare; and supporting democracy—raise relevant ethical considerations that are reasonably (...) contested. However, these accounts cannot underpin a general claim in favour of, or against, a system of research ethics governance. Instead, we defend governance in social research on the grounds that research, as an institutionalised form of enquiry, is a constitutive element of human flourishing, and that society ought to be concerned with the flourishing of its members. We conclude by considering the governance arrangements that follow from, and are justified by, our arguments. (shrink)

Beauty, or at least natural beauty, is famously a symbol of the morally good in Kant's theory of taste. Natural beauty is also, we argue, a symbol of the systematicity of nature. This symbolic connection of beauty and systematicity in nature sheds light on the relation between the principles underlying the use of reflecting judgement. The connection also motivates a more general interpretive proposal: the fact that the imagination can symbolize ideas plays a crucial role in the theory of taste; (...) it is the mechanism that underlies pure judgements of taste, the operation by which the imagination ‘schematizes without a concept’. (shrink)

In this response, we first tackle what we take to be the core disagreement between ourselves and Hammersley, namely the justification for our model of social research ethics governance. We then consider what follows from our defence of governance for ethics review and show how these claims attend to the specific concerns outlined by Hammersley.

This interview with N. Katherine Hayles, one of the foremost theorists of the posthuman, explores the concerns that led to her seminal book How We Became Posthuman, the key arguments expounded in that book, and the changes in technology and culture in the ten years since its publication. The discussion ranges across the relationships between literature and science; the trans-disciplinary project of developing a methodology appropriate to their intersection; the history of cybernetics in its cultural and political context ; (...) the changed role for psychoanalysis in the technoscientific age; and the altering forms of mediated ‘embodiment’ in the posthuman context. (shrink)

Katherine Hawley explores and compares three theories of persistence -- endurance, perdurance, and stage theories - investigating the ways in which they attempt to account for the world around us. Having provided valuable clarification of its two main rivals, she concludes by advocating stage theory.

Feminist analyses of gender concepts must avoid the inclusion problem, the fault of marginalizing or excluding some prima facie women. Sally Haslanger’s ‘ameliorative’ analysis of gender concepts seeks to do so by defining woman by reference to subordination. I argue that Haslanger’s analysis problematically marginalizes trans women, thereby failing to avoid the inclusion problem. I propose an improved ameliorative analysis that ensures the inclusion of trans women. This analysis yields ‘twin’ target concepts of woman, one concerning gender as class and (...) the other concerning gender as identity, both of which I hold to be equally necessary for feminist aims. (shrink)

I outline a number of parallels between trust and distrust, emphasising the significance of situations in which both trust and distrust would be an imposition upon the (dis)trustee. I develop an account of both trust and distrust in terms of commitment, and argue that this enables us to understand the nature of trustworthiness. Note that this article is available open access on the journal website.

Katherine Hawley investigates what trustworthiness means in our lives. We become untrustworthy when we break promises, miss deadlines, or give unreliable information. But we can't be sure about what we can commit to. Hawley examines the social obstacles to trustworthiness, and explores how we can steer between overcommitment and undercommitment.

Although the principle of fair subject selection is a widely recognized requirement of ethical clinical research, it often yields conflicting imperatives, thus raising major ethical dilemmas regarding participant selection. In this paper, we diagnose the source of this problem, arguing that the principle of fair subject selection is best understood as a bundle of four distinct sub-principles, each with normative force and each yielding distinct imperatives: (1) fair inclusion; (2) fair burden sharing; (3) fair opportunity; and (4) fair distribution of (...) third-party risks. We first map out these distinct sub-principles, and then identify the ways in which they yield conflicting imperatives for the design of inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the recruitment of participants. We then offer guidance for how decision makers should navigate these conflicting imperatives to ensure that participants are selected fairly. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there is a notion of 'counterfactual success' which stands to knowledge how as true belief stands to propositional knowledge. (I attempt to avoid the question of whether knowledge how is a type of propositional knowledge.).

There are moments when things suddenly seem strange - objects in the world lose their meaning, we feel like strangers to ourselves, or human existence itself strikes us as bizarre and unintelligible. Through a detailed philosophical investigation of Heidegger's concept of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit), Katherine Withy explores what such experiences reveal about us. She argues that while others (such as Freud, in his seminal psychoanalytic essay, 'The Uncanny') take uncanniness to be an affective quality of strangeness or eeriness, Heidegger uses (...) the concept to go beyond feeling uncanny to reach the ground of this feeling in our being uncanny. -/- "Heidegger on Being Uncanny" answers those who wonder whether human existence is fundamentally strange to itself by showing that we can be what we are only if we do not fully understand what it is to be us. This fundamental finitude in our self-understanding is our uncanniness. In this first dedicated interpretation of Heidegger's uncanniness, Withy tracks this concept from his early analyses of angst through his later interpretations of the choral ode from Sophocles's Antigone. Her interpretation uncovers a novel and robust continuity in Heidegger's thought and in his vision of the human being as uncanny, and it points the way toward what it is to live well as an uncanny human being. (shrink)

What kind of entity is a committee, a book group or a band? I argue that committees and other such social groups are concrete, composite particulars, having ordinary human beings amongst their parts. So the committee members are literally parts of the committee. This mereological view of social groups was popular several decades ago, but fell out of favour following influential objections from David-Hillel Ruben. But recent years have seen a tidal wave of work in metaphysics, including the metaphysics of (...) parts and wholes. We now have the resources to rehabilitate the mereological view of social groups. I show how this can be done, and why we should bother. (shrink)

What is Heidegger talking about when he says that being conceals itself? This is the first study to systematically address that question. Katherine Withy analyses texts from across Heidegger's philosophical career and sorts the various phenomena of concealing and concealment that Heideggerdiscusses into a highly-structured taxonomy. The taxonomy clarifies the relationships and differences between such phenomena as lethe, the nothing, earth, excess, the backgrounding of the world, and un-truth, as well as speaking falsely, talking idly, secrets, mysteries, seeming, andinauthentic (...) discovering. But in relating and differentiating these phenomena, the taxonomy shows that none of them is the self-concealing of being.Having established what the self-concealing of being is not, Withy establishes what it is. She argues that being conceals itself in that it shows up to us as lacking the sorts of contrast cases that render entities determinate and intelligible. This novel and powerful interpretation of theself-concealing of being explains why the secondary literature to date has discussed it in vague and metaphorical terms, as well as why Heidegger tends to collapse being's self-concealing into the concealment of lethe. Withy's interpretation is both a clarification of and a corrective to Heidegger'snotoriously difficult and sometimes misleading discussions of being as self-concealing. (shrink)

In the present paper, we will show that, in their complementary approaches to indirect communication, Erickson and Kierkegaard have something important to offer to one another's theories. While Kierkegaard developed a framework by which Erickson can be more profoundly understood, Erickson's accounts offer clinical cases which support what Kierkegaard described. This mutual trade of benefits not only broadens and deepens the notion of indirect communication, but also alerts us to the fact that it was recognized and developed in two relatively (...) independent disciplines, almost a hundred years apart! This parallel implies that indirect communication is, at the very least, a phenomenon worth investigating from both perspectives. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Over the past two decades, stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens-typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and incredible obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future? This (...) book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in narratives like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world. (shrink)

Division III of Being and Time (BT) was supposed to address the question of the sense of being. Being and its sense are in question because while we do understand being, it is also strangely withheld from us. That we understand being is evidenced by the fact that we have access to what and that things are (rather than not); that being is withheld from us is evidenced by the fact that we do not seem to be able to articulate (...) what it is that we grasp in this. Being is both given to us and withheld from us. To be given yet withheld is to be question-worthy—and it is also to be the proper object of phenomenology (BT 35). Being is the phenomenon: that which shows itself (phainomenon) (BT 31) but also needs to be “let be seen” (legein) (BT 32). To make sense of being is to make sense of both how it shows itself and how it hides itself. -/- Division I explains how being shows itself by, first, explaining how we discover entities in their being and, second, explicating the structure of our openness to being (i.e., disclosedness). The next step should be to explain how being hides itself—the phenomenon that Heidegger sometimes calls “falling.” But Heidegger does not do this. He is distracted by a different (albeit related) phenomenon: inauthenticity. By pursuing authenticity and inauthenticity throughout §40 and the so-called existentialist chapters in Division II, Heidegger does give us important insight into the riskiness and fragility of our relationship to being. But he does not capture the finitude that he should be aiming at: the withholding of being. Lacking this, Heidegger does not have our finite openness to being fully in view. As a result, the structure of the temporality that he draws out accounts for our openness to being but not for the finitude of this openness. This finitude is not a mere limitation on our part—it is not just that we don’t fully “get” being. It belongs to how being works that it withholds itself from us and so makes itself question-worthy. So, if Heidegger’s goal in Division III is to show how being makes sense, then he will need to make sense of this fundamental feature of being. It is, if nothing else, the feature that sparked his investigation. But because he lost sight of the withholding of being at the end of Division I, Heidegger is not in a position to make sense of being in Division III. -/- By the time he starts working seriously with the notion of phusis in the 1930s, Heidegger has reoriented himself to the phenomenon of being’s withholding. By approaching BT from the perspective of Heidegger’s work in this period, then, we can see more clearly what BT accomplished and where it veered off course. I will do this by interpreting Heidegger’s reading (in Introduction to Metaphysics [IM]) of the opening strophes of the choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone. On Heidegger’s ontological reading, these strophes show us the various features of being by speaking of the natural world: being is understood as the sea, the earth, and the living thing. I will argue that BT illuminates being as the living thing and being as the earth, and in this explains how being is given to us. But BT falters when it tries to reach being as the sea. The sea is an image of being’s simultaneous granting and withholding. Because Heidegger has not thought being’s withholding in Divisions I and II, he cannot go on to make sense of this withholding as simultaneous with being’s granting in Division III. In short, Heidegger should have thought being as the sea in Division III, but he cannot. (shrink)

You can trust your friends. You should trust your friends. Not all of your friends all of the time: you can reasonably trust different friends to different degrees, and in different domains. Still, we often trust our friends, and it is often reasonable to do so. Why is this? In this paper I explore how and whether friendship gives us reasons to trust our friends, reasons which may outstrip or conflict with our epistemic reasons. In the final section, I will (...) sketch some related questions concerning trust based on the trustee’s race, gender, or other social identity. (shrink)

Considers Auden primarily during the first decade of his litearry career, as both public figure and private man. Contains previously unpublished or uncollected poems, prose, and letters, presented with scholarly introductions and annotation by leading Auden specialists.

Drawing on work done in the area of health services research, this article outlines a view of discourse analysis that approaches discourse as a co-accomplished process involving researcher and research-participant. Without losing sight of the analytical-critical-reflexive moments that have typified discourse analytical endeavours, this article explores a form of DA that moves from discourse as object to be collected and processed away from where it is practised, towards discourse as dynamically emerging reality shared by practitioner-participants and researchers, and as flexible (...) means to intervene in the quality and safety of care practices. The article begins with highlighting the productive potential of discourse research in health. The ethics informing this mode of DA, the article goes on to explain, is interested and trustful ‘entanglement’ with those who populate this field of practice and structure it with discourse. Elsewhere referred to as ‘experience-based enquiry’, the initiative to reframe discourse research as a mode of intervention involves keeping practitioners’ interpretations and analysts’ questions, critiques and conclusions in tension. The article argues that this approach capitalizes on the intrinsically reflexive, dialogic and emergent nature of discourse. To illustrate these issues, the article presents two case studies drawn from recent projects that have manifested these researcher and practitioner-participant dynamics. The article concludes that, as emergent practice, the analysis of discourse benefits from entanglement with the people and the contexts where discourse is produced. Here, analysis vacillates between a feedback device that enables both research participants and researchers to re-appraise their and each other’s practices, and a knowledge production device that generalizes about these practices and the changes to these practices that result from the research. (shrink)

Understanding the basics of ethics is essential for a physical therapist. Diagnostic skills, technical expertise, and knowledge of the body are insufficient; being a good clinician requires a moral education as well. Bioethics in Physical Therapy: A Reader helps students develop a deeper understanding of moral principles and their philosophical underpinnings. The text encourages readers to exercise their moral imaginations and prepares them to respond to professional conflicts in an ethical manner. The reader is organized in seven units. The text (...) begins with an introduction to classical moral theories, the fundamental philosophical pillars of biomedical ethics, and a history of ethics in physical therapy. Additional units explore such topics as moral distress and the choice to be ethical, acting with integrity in the face of uncertainty, and the importance of hope in the patient encounter. Students learn about moral courage, the broad reach of justice in the medical field, and the lived experience of illness. Each unit features an opening scenario, a section on cultivating professional values, introductions to the key topic and the readings, comprehension questions, and post-reading critical thinking questions that reference the opening scenario. Written to be engaging and accessible, Bioethics in Physical Therapy: A Reader is designed to help future therapists understand the importance of ethics in practice. It is an ideal resource for all courses in the discipline. (shrink)

We articulate a view of natural kinds as complex universals. We do not attempt to argue for the existence of universals. Instead, we argue that, given the existence of universals, and of natural kinds, the latter can be understood in terms of the former, and that this provides a rich, flexible framework within which to discuss issues of indeterminacy, essentialism, induction, and reduction. Along the way, we develop a 'problem of the many' for universals.

One reason that fake news and other objectionable views gain traction is that they often come to us in the form of testimony from those in our immediate social circles – from those we trust. A language around this phenomenon has developed which describes social epistemic structures in terms of ‘epistemic bubbles’ and ‘epistemic echo chambers’. These concepts involve the exclusion of external evidence in various ways. While these concepts help us see the ways that evidence is socially filtered, it (...) doesn’t help us understand the social functions that these structures play, which limits our ability to intervene on them. In this paper, I introduce a new concept – that of the epistemic bunker. This concept helps us better account for a central feature of the phenomenon, which is that exclusionary social epistemic structures are often constructed to offer their members safety, either actual or perceived. Recognising this allows us to develop better strategies to mitigate their negative effects. (shrink)

Analytic metaphysics is in resurgence; there is renewed and vigorous interest in topics such as time, causation, persistence, parthood and possible worlds. We who share this interest often pay lip-service to the idea that metaphysics should be informed by modern science; some take this duty very seriously.2 But there is also a widespread suspicion that science cannot really contribute to metaphysics, and that scientific findings grossly underdetermine metaphysical claims. For some, this prompts the thought ‘so much the worse for metaphysics’; (...) others mutter ‘so much the worse for science’. (shrink)

This book is a wonderful resource for historians and philosophers of mathematics and physics alike, not just for Hilbert's own work in physics, but also because Corry sets Hilbert in context, bringing out the people with whom Hilbert had contact, describing their work and possible links with Hilbert's work, and describing the activities going on around Hilbert. The historical thesis of this book is that Hilbert worked on a wide range of issues in physics for a period lasting more than (...) two decades, employing and developing his axiomatic approach throughout. One conclusion that follows from this is that Hilbert's 1915–1917 work relating to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was a natural continuation of Hilbert's pre-existing interests and activities, and not a one-off foray into foreign territory. 1Of especial interest to philosophers of mathematics are two further theses. Corry stresses that for Hilbert geometry is an empirical science, and related to this argues first, that Hilbert intends the axiomatic method to be used in enhancing our understanding of the content of a given theory via relating the results of the axiomatic investigation back to the intuitive content of the axioms; and, second, that to understand Hilbert's axiomatic approach in mathematics we must pay serious attention to his work in physics.Corry also hopes to show ‘the significant and unique contribution of Hilbert to certain important developments in twentieth-century physics’ . 2 In the end, this assessment of Hilbert's contribution to physics is far from clear cut: the two cases where Hilbert goes into the details of a physical theory show him lacking feel for what is important physically with respect to that theory. Nevertheless, philosophers and historians of physics will find a great deal to interest them in the story of Hilbert's involvement in physics, and in the details …. (shrink)

Simone Weil’s supernaturalist interpretations of tragedy challenge not only the philosophical skepticism but also the religious rationalism characteristic of the modern age. This book boldly points out a supernaturalist alternative to contemporary, post-structuralist literary theory. This study of classical tragic drama offers a sacralizing impetus to secular discussions of literature. The book’s Platonic premises and its grounding in the transcendental outlook of the religious traditions furnish a sacred illumination. Religious mystery and the cross of Christ both overshadow and deepen philosophical (...) approaches to literary criticism, including theories of tragedy. Simone Weil’s conception of tragic art, rooted in a mystical Christian metaphysics, offers original insight into the nature of tragedy. In contradiction of the prevailing secular outlook, Weil regards classical tragedy as a sacred art form. Tragic masterpieces evoke not the chaotic or irrational, as modernist interpreters hold, but rather a good which is absolute. (shrink)

In 1995 Barbara Held, professor of Psychology , published what is, I think, the first book of its kind - Back to Reality: A Critique of Postmodern Theory in Psychotherapy - a book not about how to do psychotherapy, but about how we should think about doing it. The work engages in a vigorous examination of the recent antirealist trend in psychotherapy and it opens up an important and timelyepistemological debate, but its conclusion - that postmodern (narrative) therapists ought to (...) reject antirealism in favour ofa modest realism - is based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the originary aim behind the adoption of an antirealist epistemology. It is Held’s contention that the narrative therapy movement adopted antirealism as a means of “maximizing individuality” in therapy, a goal which canand should be achieved by way of realism. I suggest here that, to the contrary, the aim of this epistemological shift was the resolution of strictly epistemological problems, and that a return to realism would be antithetical to this aim.En 1995, Barbara Held,professeure de psychologie, a publié ce qui, à mon avis, est un livre inouï: Back to Reality: A Critique of Postmodern Theory in Psychotherapy. L’ouvrage entreprend un examen critique des tendances antiréalistes que l’on retrouve dans la psychothérapie aujourd‘hui et ouvre un débat épistémologique important et opportun. Cependant, sa conclusion, à l’effet que les thérapeutes postmodernes (narratifs) devraient rejeter l’antirealisme au profit d’un réalisme modeste, se fonde sur une interprétation erronée du but premier de l’épistémologie antiréaliste. Held soutient que le mouvement de thérapie narrative a adopté l’antiréalisme afin de “maximiser l’individualité” en thérapie, un but qui peut et devrait être atteint plutôt par le réalisme. Ici, je prétends au contraire que letournant épistémologique a été entrepris dans le but de résoudre des problèmes strictement épistémologiques, et qu’un retour au réalisme serait contraire à ce but. (shrink)

Social groups—like teams, committees, gender groups, and racial groups—play a central role in our lives and in philosophical inquiry. Here I develop and motivate a structuralist ontology of social groups centered on social structures (i.e., networks of relations that are constitutively dependent on social factors). The view delivers a picture that encompasses a diverse range of social groups, while maintaining important metaphysical and normative distinctions between groups of different kinds. It also meets the constraint that not every arbitrary collection of (...) people is a social group. In addition, the framework provides resources for developing a broader structuralist view in social ontology. (shrink)