Mary Anne Warren investigates a theoretical question that is at the centre of practical and professional ethics: what are the criteria for having moral status? That is: what does it take to be an entity towards which people have moral considerations? Warren argues that no single property will do as a sole criterion, and puts forward seven basic principles which establish moral status. She then applies these principles to three controversial moral issues: voluntary euthanasia, abortion, and the status of (...) non-human animals. (shrink)

La renommée nationale et internationale de Pierre Bourdieu lui est venue de la sociologie, une sociologie un peu particulière, dite " des élites ", ou plus communément, " de la domination ", au fil de laquelle il ne se fit pas faute de fustiger les représentants de celle qu'il appelait " La discipline du couronnement ", la philosophie. C'était là pourtant son terroir d'origine, sa formation première, et la seule dans laquelle il possédât un diplôme. Mais il ne voyait dans (...) ses anciens " collègues " que des lectors figés dans une position scolastique qui les éloignait des urgences du monde et du " sens pratique ". Pourtant, c'est à l'aide de La philosophie qu'il critique la philosophie, et vise à l'éduquer, qu'il forge les concepts majeurs de sa sociologie, comme l'habitus, la violence symbolique. Et l'enjeu de ses recherches est encore un enjeu philosophique, qui le rapproche de ceux qui ont voulu transformer le monde, au lieu de se borner à le penser. (shrink)

Mary Anne Perkins re-examines Coleridge's claim to have developed a "logosophic" system which attempted "to reduce all knowledges into harmony." She pays particular attention to his later writings, some of which are still unpublished. She suggests that the accusations of plagiarism and of muddled, abstruse metaphysics which have been levelled at him may be challenged by a thorough reading of his work in which its unifying principle is revealed. She explores the various meanings of the term "logos," a recurrent (...) theme in every area of Coleridge's thought--philosophy, religion, natural science, history, political and social criticism, literary theory, and psychology. Coleridge was responding to the concerns of his own time, a revolutionary age in which increasing intellectual and moral fragmentation and confusion seemed to him to threaten both individuals and society. Drawing on the whole of Western intellectual history, he offered a ground for philosophy which was relational rather than mechanistic. He is one of those few thinkers whose work appears to become more interesting and his perceptions more acute as the historical gulf widens. This book is a contribution to the reassessment that he deserves. (shrink)

The Forum and the Tower tackles a fascinating and perennial topic: the relationship between the academy and the world of politics. The accomplished Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon traces this crucial relationship from Classical Greece taking readers through the Roman Empire, Renaissance Italy, the English revolution, the Federalist era in the US, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Concert of Europe, the progressive era, and the New Deal/World War II era.

Cosgrove, Mary-Anne Below are 'talking points' based on an article in AH No. 121, 'AI on the Go: Notes on the current development and use of Artificial Intelligence', by Carl Mahoney. Carl is a Humanist Society of Victoria member, and was professor and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Building, University of Technology, Papua New Guinea.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Milton and Political CorrectnessMary Ann McGrail (bio)In the opening of the title essay of Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss speculates:We can easily imagine that a historian living in a totalitarian country, a generally respected and unsuspected member of the only party in existence, might be led by his investigations to doubt the soundness of the government-sponsored interpretation of the history of religion. Nobody would prevent him (...) from publishing a passionate attack on what he would call the liberal view. He would of course have to state the liberal view before attacking it; he would make that statement in the quiet, unspectacular and somewhat boring manner which would seem to be but natural; he would use many technical terms, give many quotations and attach undue importance to insignificant details; he would seem to forget the holy war of mankind in the petty squabbles of pedants. Only when he reached the core of the argument would he write three or four sentences in that terse and lively style which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who love to think. That central passage would state the case of the adversaries more clearly, compellingly and mercilessly than it had ever been stated in the heyday of liberalism, for he would silently drop all the foolish excrescences of the liberal creed which were allowed to grow up during the time when liberalism had succeeded and therefore was approaching dormancy. His reasonable young reader would for the first time catch a glimpse of the forbidden fruit. The attack, the bulk of the work, would consist of virulent expansions of the most virulent utterances in the holy book or books of the ruling party. The intelligent young man who, being young, had until then been somehow attracted by those immoderate utterances, would now be merely disgusted and, after having tasted the forbidden fruit, even bored by them. Reading the book for the second and third time, he would detect in the very arrangement of the quotations from the authoritative books significant additions to those few terse statements which occur in the center of the rather short first part.[24–25]This description of exoteric writing—that is, writing with two teachings: “a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground; and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject, which is indicated only between the lines” [Strauss 36]—is the principle of reading most closely associated with Strauss and Straussians. What Strauss describes here is the practice of “writing between the lines” by authors holding heterodox views, constrained by the prejudices of their audience or the vested interests of the regimes within which they write. The term is broadly misused by both opponents and students of Strauss’s work themselves and has helped to gain Straussians the mythopoetic status of hermetic school. The popular version of this theory [End Page 98] is that there are writers with secret teachings, and this occasionally lends itself to different kinds of scholarly deception and grandstanding.Strauss, in this passage, refers to the position of a writer in a totalitarian country. This might lead a writer or critic in a liberal, democratic country to conclude wrongly that this kind of writing would not appear in a liberal society where there is no direct suppression of freedom of speech. I wish to suggest in this article that Milton’s Areopagitica uses a form of exoteric writing, what Macaulay calls a “peculiar art,” which addresses itself not just to the dangers of suppression of thought from above, but also to the potential dangers of suppression of thought from below. In liberal regimes, de Tocqueville located the origins of the latter, the suppression of thought from below, in what he called the tyranny of the majority. One contemporary form of this is “political correctness,” an insistence that public writings and speeches be purified to conform to a particular view of what constitutes “unprejudiced” language. Geoffrey Hill has referred to these communally enforced constraints as “the thuggish stereotypes of political correctness,” a phrase which conveys the paradox of a concept which is based simultaneously on a certainty about the incapacity of writers... (shrink)

This article reports on the preliminary findings of a research project on the phenomenon of the blending of Christianity and Goddess Spirituality1, with particular reference to the beliefs and values of practitioners. The contours of a grassroots Christian Thealogy are sketched by drawing from the transcripts of over 100 interviews with women who self-identify as blending Christianity and Goddess Spirituality.

By a potential person I shall mean an entity which is not now a person but which is capable of developing into a person, given certain biologically and/or technologically possible conditions. This is admittedly a narrower sense than some would attach to the term ‘potential'. After all, people of the twenty-fifth century, if such there will be, are in some sense potential people now, even though the specific biological entities from which they will develop, i.e. the particular gametes or concepti, (...) do not yet exist. For there do exist, in the reproductive capacities of people now living and in the earth's resources, conditions adequate to produce these future people eventually, provided of course that various possible catastrophes are avoided. Indeed, in some sense of ‘potential’ there have been countless billions of potential people from the beginning of time. But I am concerned not with such remote potentialities but with currently existing entities that are capable of developing into people. (shrink)

Paul Menzel and Donald Light ("A Conservative Case for Universal Access to Health Care," Jul-Aug 2006) tell a story that is plausible. However, based on my twenty-five years of experience as a policy analyst interested in access to health care, I find it inaccurate for a number of reasons.

The classification of clinical problems, such as AIDS, requires choices. Choices are made on epistemic (i.e., knowledge-based) and non-epistemic (i.e., action-based) grounds. That is, the ways in which we classify clinical problems, such as AIDS, involve a balancing of different understandings of clinical reality and of clinical values among participants of the clinical community. On this view, the interplay between epistemic and non-epistemic interests occurs within the embrace of particular clinical contexts.The ways in which we classify AIDS is the topic (...) of this paper. We consider the extent to which we construct clinical reality; we examine a suggested classification of AIDS; and we conclude suggesting that the choice regarding how to classify AIDS is the result of negotiation among participants in the clinical community. (shrink)

Thinking Through Breast Cancer is a philosophical analysis of breast cancer inspired by the author's journey as a breast cancer patient. It sets out to show the relevancy of philosophical thinking in medicine today and shares advice about how to navigate the uncertainty of breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and survival.

In this essay, and in his honor, I focus on two of physician-philosopher H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.’s many contributions, namely, his view that biomedical ethics cannot offer a singular content-driven theoretical approach and requires an appreciation of epistemologies of knowing in medicine. While these two positions remain controversial, because we all want definitive answers to our questions concerning what we ought to do in medicine and elsewhere, Dr. Engelhardt’s view makes possible discussion and debate in medicine to include diverse, defensible (...) ways of knowing. In the end, Dr. Engelhardt’s approach in biomedical ethics is one of shared decision making and negotiation. This is an important model if we take respect for patients seriously in the clinical setting. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of a research project to understand how a major technology adoption project is taken up in the social setting of Calgary’s three major homeless shelters. An understanding of how technology is used ‘‘on the ground’’ and how it relates to the project’s goals is the key contribution of this research. The results of interviews with clients at the homeless shelters and shelter staff provide the empirical data for an analysis of the major issues concerning the (...) actual and intended use of this Smart Communities project. The research project is influenced by institutional ethnography, which looks at the role of texts in coordinating social relations. This article suggests that information technology could be seen as a text ‘‘superpower’’ in coordinating social relations among socially ‘‘at risk’’ people in particular. It concludes that more transparent dialogue is required on how actions are concerted by information technology. (shrink)

A User's Guide to Melancholy takes Robert Burton's encyclopaedic masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621) as a guide to one of the most perplexing, elusive, attractive, and afflicting diseases of the Renaissance. Burton's Anatomy is perhaps the largest, strangest, and most unwieldy self-help book ever written. Engaging with the rich cultural and literary framework of melancholy, this book traces its causes, symptoms, and cures through Burton's writing. Each chapter starts with a case study of melancholy - from (...) the man who was afraid to urinate in case he drowned his town to the girl who purged a live eel - as a way into exploring the many facets of this mental affliction. A User's Guide to Melancholy presents in an accessible and illustrated format the colourful variety of Renaissance melancholy, and contributes to contemporary discussions about wellbeing by revealing the earlier history of mental health conditions. (shrink)

Studies from many countries report that secondary school students do not master written argumentation well enough. This article presents a case study from lower secondary school where the question of problems in written argumentation is approached from a different angle: instead of focusing on argumentative weaknesses in student texts, it concentrates on what students are capable of and struggle with when they write argumentative texts in cooperation with a scaffolding teacher. Findings from this study show that a clear text pattern (...) communicated through teaching and teacher response helped weak as well as strong writers to improve common problems related to audience awareness and the structure of argumentative texts. In cooperation with a commenting teacher all students were also able to support a standpoint with more reasons and to strengthen their own position by refuting a counterargument, although to varying degrees. However, only a couple of revised texts suggest that students had the will, skill and insight needed to follow up teacher response that encouraged a more distanced view on heated debates, conflict negotiations, self-reflection and critical thinking. (shrink)

Here is, we think, the point. It doesn't matter for what reason the writer or painter or lover destroys the creation: the real point is that destruction itself, like a gigantic statement. It is, in fact, something of an excitation, a stimulation to further thought: what is this ACTION about?' What do Stéphane Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud, Meret Oppenheim, Asger Jorn, Yoko Ono, Tom Phillips and Martin Arnold have in common? Whereas a wealth of critics have diagnosed contemporary art's preoccupations with (...) madness, depression and self-abuse as well as its tendency to cultivate an (anti- )aesthetics of the negative, the excremental and the abject (say, from the Vienna Action Group to Serrano, McCarthy or Delvoye), much less attention has been paid to how modern and contemporary artists and public have thrived on the destruction, disfiguration and obliteration of work by the artists and/or by that of others. From Artaud's 'terminal' notebooks to the recent upsurge in 'erasure poetics', the history of 'undoing' art deserves to be recounted in a positive mode and rescued from popular narratives of the decline and death of the avant-garde. (shrink)

"Readers interested in feminist studies, applied ethics, or social and political philosophy should find Gendercide especially interesting and informative. Highly recommended."-CHOICE.

_Jung and the Human Psyche: An Understandable Introduction_ presents a comprehensive introduction to Jungian theory, taking the reader through the major themes of Jung's work in a clear way, relating such concepts to individual experience. Drawing on her extensive experience in practicing and teaching Jungian psychology, Mary Ann Mattoon succeeds in making the fundamental insights of Jung's work accessible. The major topics of Jungian psychology are presented in a manner that is clear, emotionally engaging, well illustrated and non-dogmatic. Areas (...) covered include: The visible psyche: ego, persona, typology. The hidden psyche: self, shadow, unconscious, archetypes, instincts. Becoming who we are: early development, gender. Obstacles and helps to growth: complexes, projection, psychopathology. Helps from the psyche: psychic energy, self-regulation/compensation, symbol, synchronicity, creativity. _Jung and the Human Psyche_ provides an original and imaginative introduction to Jung's work, and will appeal to students of Jungian psychology, those considering training in Jungian analysis, and anyone interested in Jungian psychology. (shrink)