In many countries, including patients are legally entitled to request copies of their clinical notes. However, this process remains time-consuming and burdensome, and it remains unclear how much of the medical record must be made available. Online access to notes offers a way to overcome these challenges and in around 10 countries worldwide, via secure web-based portals, many patients are now able to read at least some of the narrative reports written by clinicians (‘open notes’). However, even in countries that (...) have implemented the practice many clinicians have resisted the idea remaining doubtful of the value of opening notes, and anticipating patients will be confused or anxious by what they read. Against this scepticism, a growing body of qualitative and quantitative research reveals that patients derive multiple benefits from reading their notes. We address the contrasting perceptions of this practice innovation, and claim that the divergent views of patients and clinicians can be explained as a case of epistemic injustice. Using a range of evidence, we argue that patients are vulnerable to (oftentimes, non-intentional) epistemic injustice. Nonetheless, we conclude that the marginalisation of patients’ access to their health information exemplifies a form of epistemic exclusion, one with practical and ethical consequences including for patient safety. (shrink)

Liz Jackson is Professor of Education and Head of Department of International Education at the Education University of Hong Kong. Liz served as the President of the Philosophy of Education Society...

In this article I describe the development of my collaboration with the textile artist Susie Freeman in the production of the visual arts project Pharmacopoeia. Over the last 3 years we have created a body of work that aims to provide information about common medical treatments in a way that engages the public imagination. The work is dominated by the use of active pharmaceuticals, both pills and capsules, which are incorporated into dramatic fabrics by a process known as pocket knitting. (...) These fabrics are then made into clothing and accessories, making their individual messages easier to ‘read’. The work aims to encourage people to think about their own medical and pharmacological history, and to reflect on their relationship with commonly prescribed drugs. It also reveals how dependent our society is on pharmaceuticals, how ambivalent we feel about them and yet how casually we use them. (shrink)

The problem of controlling an artificial general intelligence has fascinated both scientists and science-fiction writers for centuries. Today that problem is becoming more important because the time when we may have a superhuman intelligence among us is within the foreseeable future. Current average estimates place that moment to before 2060. Some estimates place it as early as 2040, which is quite soon. The arrival of the first AGI might lead to a series of events that we have not seen before: (...) rapid development of an even more powerful AGI developed by the AGIs themselves. This has wide-ranging implications to the society and therefore it is something that must be studied well before it happens. In this paper we will discuss the problem of limiting the risks posed by the advent of AGIs. In a thought experiment, we propose an AGI which has enough human-like properties to act in a democratic society, while still retaining its essential artificial general intelligence properties. We discuss ways of arranging the co-existence of humans and such AGIs using a democratic system of coordination and coexistence. If considered a success, such a system could be used to manage a society consisting of both AGIs and humans. The democratic system where each member of the society is represented in the highest level of decision-making guarantees that even minorities would be able to have their voices heard. The unpredictability of the AGI era makes it necessary to consider the possibility that a population of autonomous AGIs could make us humans into a minority. (shrink)

Clinical ethics consultations exist to support patients, families and clinicians who are facing ethical or moral challenges related to patient care. They provide a forum for open communication, where all stakeholders are encouraged to express their concerns and articulate their viewpoints. Ethics consultations can be requested by patients, caregivers or members of a patient’s clinical or supportive team. Althoughpatientsand by extension their families (especially in cases of decisional incapacity) are the common denominators in most ethics consultations, these constituents are theleastlikely (...) to request them. At many healthcare organisations in the USA, ethics consultations are overwhelmingly requested by physicians and other clinicians. We believe it is vital that healthcare institutions bridge the knowledge gaps and power imbalances over access to ethics consultation services through augmented policies, procedures and infrastructure. With enhanced education and support, patients and families may use ethics consultation to elevate their voices and prioritise their unique characteristics and preferences in the delivery of their healthcare. Empowering patients and families to request ethics consultation can only strengthen the patient/family–clinician relationship, enhance the shared decision-making model of care and ultimately lead to improved patient-centred care. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 11, October 2020, Page 1109-1112.

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that (...) ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience. (shrink)

This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...

Volume 52, Issue 8, July 2020, Page 835-835.

Liz JacksonEducation University of Hong KongNel Noddings is known around the world for her contributions to philosophy and philosophy of education. Her work on caring and relational ethics broke ne...

Liz JacksonEducation University of Hong KongGiven how important textbooks continue to be in education, how textbooks are read for learning and research remains poorly understood. As Michael Apple n...

The ethic of care provides not only a basis for understanding relationships of care at the micro level but also a potent form of political ethics, relevant to the development of welfare services. Williams (2001), for example, argues that the concept of care has the capacity to be a central referent in social policy?a point at which social and cultural transformations meet with the changing relations of welfare (Williams 2001, p. 470). English social care services are currently in another period (...) of change precipitated by the ?personalisation agenda?. This agenda is seen as having the potential to revolutionise social care, to create the conditions needed to tailor services to individual needs, and to give service users greater choice and control, including, where possible, control over their own service budgets or direct possession and management of care funds. These developments are inextricably linked to broader economic and social trends, key amongst which are the ageing of the population and changing economic conditions affecting both the labour market and the market for care services. This article applies the feminist ethic of care to an analysis of the personalisation agenda in the context of care for dependent older people. It highlights fundamental political questions posed concerning the nature and extent of older people's need for care, responsibility for meeting these needs and the associated costs. It questions whether the personalisation agenda could potentially offer a more responsive form of care, by placing more power and control in older people's hands. Key points considered are the individualisation of care and the ways in which control is conceptualised. The article concludes with an assessment of the feminist ethic of care as a basis for policy evaluation. (shrink)

Nicholas Gresson 2001L-RUniversity of Auckland, Faculty of Education PhD graduates in 2001:Elizabeth Grierson/Gresson, Tina Besley, Ho-Chia Chueh, Janet Mansfield, Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul, Nesta De...

Cultural historical research has deliberately challenged “historical realism,” the view that history is comprised entirely of observable actions that actually occurred, and instead has emphasized the historical significance of thoughts, emotions, and representations; it has also focused on the invisible, the momentary, and the perishable. These latter elements introduce the notion of the possible in history. This article examines the ways in which cultural history has approached the notion of the possible, as well as the methodological and theoretical implications of (...) this approach. Its chief claim is that the idea of possibility is fundamental for the concept of culture and ineliminable from its historical study.The question of possibility is present in multiple ways in the study of history; it is important to distinguish among different levels of possibility. The possible may mean, for instance, what it is possible for historians to know about the past, or the possibilities open to historical agents themselves, or, indeed, the possibilities they perceived themselves as having even if these seem impossible from the point of view of the historian. The article starts with the first aspect and moves on toward the possibilities that existed in the past world either in fact or in the minds of those in the past.The article argues that the study of past cultures always entails the mapping of past possibilities. The first strand of the essay builds on the metaphor of the black hole and intends to solve one of the central problems faced by cultural historians, namely, how to access the horizon of the people of the past, their experience of their own time, especially when the sources remain silent. The second, more speculative strand builds on the notion of plenitude and is designed to open up avenues for further discussion about the concept of culture in particular. (shrink)

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 25, Issue 3, Page 297-299, September 2011.

Felicity Haynes earned Honours degrees in English and French literature from The University of Western Australia and completed her doctorate on reason and understanding at the University of Illinoi...

This study offers a new interpretation of Hegelian recognition – a central tenet of German Idealism – focusing on positive ethical behaviours, such as love and forgiveness. Building on the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Disley reassesses Hegel’s approach to the subject/object dialectic and explores the previously neglected theological dimensions of his writings. Her new interpretation offers an innovative reading of Hegel’s stance on the relationship between intersubjectivity, forgiveness and repentance in his social theory.0.

Conference environments enable diverse roles for academics. However, conferences are hardly entered into by participants as equals. Academics enter into and experience professional environments differently according to culture, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and more. This paper considers from a philosophical perspective entering and initiating culturally into academic conferences as a woman. It discusses theories of gender and emotional labor and emotional management, focusing on Arlie Hochschild’s foundational work, and affect in gendered social relations, considering Sara Ahmed’s theorization of the feminist (...) killjoy and the affect alien. It applies these lenses to explore problematic experiences of women initiates at conferences. The paper proceeds with a theoretical discussion of gender, emotional labor, and affect. Then the paper discusses women academics’ experiences generally and at conferences, including educational research conferences, with reference to relevant higher education researc... (shrink)

Schools self-identify as caring communities and teach young children to be caring for each other. But schools also teach other contradictory and competing messages, such as individualism and self-reliance, rationalist concepts of justice and meritocracy, and other neoliberal approaches to life and community. Furthermore, while endorsements of care are commonly found in educational institutions, caring is not always (or even often) practiced or regarded as a major aim in schools, in contrast with human capital approaches to youth development. This essay (...) examines how schools do and don’t care. At its core is the rearticulation of care ethics in education, and what caring means within the contemporary field. Over time, enthusiasm for care ethics has peaked and waned. It begins with a brief explanation of what caring is within the field of care ethics, before it considers how caring is ideally involved in education. In this case, discourses of care ethics and caring in education can be coopted against the writings of care ethicists to complement positive psychology, socially conservative character education and civic education, and individualistic and neoliberal approaches to education. As a result, schools can appear to care, but do so in highly distorted ways. These distortions, I argue, do not reveal fundamental limitations or flaws within care ethics approaches to care. Instead, they demand a reconsideration and rearticulation of care ethics in the contemporary education landscape: a context which has changed considerably since debates and articulations of care ethics in the 1980s. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 120-125.

There is a long history in science and technology studies of tracking problematic objects, such as controversies, matters of concern, and issues, using various digital tools. But what happens when public problems do not play out in these familiar ways? In this paper, we will think through the methodological implications of studying “problems” in relation to recent events surrounding the sharing of patient data in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. When a data sharing agreement called care.data was (...) announced in 2013, nearly 1.5 million citizens chose to opt out. Yet, in subsequent years, there has been little evidence of a robust public mobilising around data sharing. We will attempt to track this elusive ‘non problem’ using some digital tools developed in STS for the purpose of mapping issues and problem definitions within science. Although we find these digital tools are unable to capture the “problem,” the process of searching helps us map the terrain of the case and forces us to consider wider definitions. (shrink)

In a conversation in Interview magazine, the painter Manuel Solano reflects on the shifts in their artistic practice after going blind at 26 years old. Their first museum show came after this devel...

The Philosophy of Education Society of Australia (PESA) has been immensely proud of owning the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT), which over its 55 years of existence has become one...

A persuasive argument that theism is a Humean “natural belief” relies on the assertion that belief in intelligent design is caused by “Cleanthes’s propensity,” introduced in Hume’s Dialogues—a universal propensity to believe in a designer triggered by the observation of apparent telos in nature. But Hume neverclaims in his own voice that religious belief is founded on anything like Cleanthes’s propensity. Instead, in the Natural History, he argues that the belief in invisible intelligent power is caused by the psychological propensity (...) to anthropomorphize triggered by the observation of disorder. I argue that religious belief is among theHumean natural beliefs only if this propensity is relevantly similar to the propensity responsible for inductive beliefs—the paradigmatic case of natural belief. Evidence from the Natural History and Treatise confirm that this is not the case. I conclude that belief in intelligent design is not, for Hume, a natural belief. (shrink)

Humility is regarded as beneficial for individuals, relationships, and society. It is believed to increase well-being and tolerance of difference and enhance interpersonal relationships. Educating for humility could be regarded as an important element and goal of education as it helps students realise their limitations and consider different (even opposite) perspectives. However, as with other virtues, humility may be conceptualised and expressed differently across diverse cultural communities. Similarly, how to educate for humility may look different in schools around the world. (...) This special issue includes varied explorations of the philosophical and theoretical roots underpinning different conceptions of humility and their implications for education. Taken together, the papers in this issue provide a foundation for understanding the importance of humility across cultural and historical traditions of past and present, particularly those of western and Chinese societies. As such, this special issue can be informative to colleagues in virtue ethics, comparative philosophy, and moral education, as well as others who are interested in understanding contexts and meanings of humility around the world, in society and education today. (shrink)

The global #MeToo movement has precipitated a reckoning with gendered, sexual, and other forms of harassment and bullying in higher education. In academia, harassment is rooted in the history of re...

Volume 52, Issue 9, August 2020, Page 913-917.

Educating students for emotional wellbeing is a vital task in schools. However, educating emotions is not straightforward. Emotional processes can be challenging to identify and control. How emotions are valued varies across societies, while individuals within societies face different emotional expectations. For example, girls face pressure to be happy and caring, while boys are often encouraged to be brave. This text analyses the best practices of educating emotions. The focus is not just on the psychological benefits of emotional regulation, but (...) also on how calls for educating emotions connect to the aims of society. The book explores psychology's understanding of emotions, 'the politics of emotions', and philosophy. It also discusses education for happiness, compassion, gratitude, resilience, mindfulness, courage, vulnerability, anger, sadness, and fear. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical LifeLiz DisleyRobert B. Pippin. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 308. Paper, $29.99In this work, Pippin offers an interpretation of freedom, rationality, and agency in Hegel’s work and adds substantive content to the key concept of recognition. In doing so, he offers not only a compelling elucidation of a particularly (...) opaque part of Hegel’s analysis of human action and interaction, but also demonstrates the relevance of his practical philosophy to contemporary discussions about free will, intersubjectivity, autonomy, recognition, and liberalism. Pippin provides a substantial defense of Hegel’s position in the context of contemporary political philosophy, arguing against a commonly-held view that Hegelian political philosophy must be much closer to modern communitarian theories than those of classical or modern liberalism. Pippin’s work is central to the recent resurgence of interest in Hegel’s theoretical philosophy by analytical philosophers such as Robert Brandom and John McDowell, as well as the renewed study of recognition in a practical context.Controversially, Pippin claims that Hegel has only one theory of intersubjectivity and recognition from the time of the Jena writings to the Philosophy of Right. The theory develops from an initial stage, where “the desideratum of mutual recognition is posed and explored,” to a realization that ethical life as described in the Philosophy of Right provides the necessary conditions for rational, mutual recognition (184n4). Thus, he rejects the common view in recent Continental Hegel scholarship, asserted by critics including Jürgen Habermas, Michael Theunissen, and Axel Honneth, that Hegel fails to develop adequately the theory of intersubjectivity initially present in his earlier writings and subsumes intersubjectivity into a “grand metaphysical process” of the Absolute Subject’s self-manifestation (184).Pippin defends Hegel from this common charge on the basis of his “very unusual” concept of freedom (185). The key claim here is that Hegel does not set recognition or indeed other-relation as a precondition for any kind of self-relation, but rather, “A true individual [End Page 112] is a free subject and recognition relations function in a complex way as conditions for that possibility” (186). This seems like a promising method of demonstrating that Hegel’s intersubjectivity does not, after all, dissolve in the face of a monological divine conception of reality. The difficulty with the approach, as Pippin concedes, is that it involves making a series of radical, strange, and controversial claims. These claims, in general, focus on the temporal priority of freedom, recognition, and rationality: deeds can count as “mine” in Pippin’s special sense only if they are undertaken rationally, but this state of rationality depends on being in a social state of recognizing and being recognized (190). However, it is neither radical nor strange to make a clear distinction between human interdependence in terms of our particular social psychology and in terms of “an ideal of normative mutuality inherent in any attempt to act” (211).Pippin appreciates that defenders of Hegel’s concept of recognition do not want to say that I cannot be a free subject by myself, but at the same time want to leave the door open for there to be some kind of possibility of ascertaining moral harm in cases of failure to recognize. For Pippin, free actions, and actions committed out of free will, are those committed by agents in a particular social context, namely being situated within norm-governed relations of reciprocal recognition to others. Such an approach fulfills neither of these criteria, since it means I cannot be free by myself but also that, in the case of my being placed in a situation where I am not within these relations of reciprocal recognition to others, there is no obvious originator of moral harm caused by this recognition (218). Pippin accepts that there is no clear answer to this difficulty, but his account of the genesis of norms and social rationality does save Hegel’s account from the objection by Theunissen, Habermas, Honneth et al. mentioned above. Like Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Pippin sees the answer to charges of introducing a... (shrink)

Contemporary genetic and biomedical research on race and ethnicity has reignited the debate over the biological significance of these categories. This article provides an overview of the critical literature concerning the categorization of Hispanic and Hispanic populations within these research programs. More specifically, this article focuses on issues regarding: The conceptualization of Hispanic identity, issues of data collection and generalization (e.g., the use of a specific Hispanic nationality as a stand‐in for all Hispanics), the tension between social and biological classifications (...) of ethnic populations, and the social, political, and scientific implications of genetic research for Latin America. (shrink)