Länsimaisessa kulttuurissa ihminen on perinteisesti esitetty omalakisena ja itseriittoisena toimijana, vaikka yhteiskunta on aina rakentunut monilajisen vuorovaikutuksen varaan. Eläimillä on ollut ja on edelleenkin merkittävä vaikutus ihmisten historiaan ja yhteiskuntaan. Kanssakulkijat valottaa niitä erilaisia tapoja, joilla ihmiset ovat suhtautuneet kohtaamiinsa eläimiin ja jakaneet arkensa, työnsä ja kotinsa niiden kanssa. Monitieteinen teos nostaa esiin ihmisten ja eläinten vuorovaikutuksen moninaisia muotoja ja erittelee niissä tapahtuneita muutoksia Suomessa.

In the Netherlands, in 2002, euthanasia became a legitimate medical act, only allowed when the due care criteria and procedural requirements are met. Legally, an Advanced Euthanasia Directive can replace direct communication if a patient can no longer express his own wishes. In the past decade, an exponential number of persons with dementia share a euthanasia request with their physician. The impact this on physicians, and the consequent support needs, remained unknown. Our objective was to gain more insight into the (...) experiences and needs of Dutch general practitioners and elderly care physicians when handling a euthanasia request from a person with dementia. We performed a qualitative interview study. Participants were recruited via purposive sampling. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using the conventional thematic content analysis. Eleven general practitioners and elderly care physicians with a variety of experience and different attitudes towards euthanasia for PWD were included. Euthanasia requests appeared to have a major impact on physicians. Difficulties they experienced were related to timing, workload, pressure from and expectations of relatives, society’s negative view of dementia in combination with the ‘right to die’ view, the interpretation of the law and AEDs, ethical considerations, and communication with PWD and relatives. To deal with these difficulties, participants need support from colleagues and other professionals. Although elderly care physicians appreciated moral deliberation and support by chaplains, this was hardly mentioned by GPs. Euthanasia requests in dementia seem to place an ethically and emotionally heavy burden on Dutch GPs and elderly care physicians. The awareness of, and access to, existing and new support mechanisms needs further exploration. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay historicizes the genre of women’s autobiography and the concept of genius in the context of Gertrude Stein’s popular work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It argues that Stein draws on the form, content, and style of the domestic memoir, a type of self-writing that was popularized in the nineteenth century as a specifically feminine form of autobiography and remained central to women's self-writing into the twentieth century. Because of its relational and anecdotal nature, the domestic memoir provides (...) Stein a canvas on which to play with the gendered categories of "wife" and "genius." Ultimately, Stein's playful reimagining of gender roles and domesticity serves to redefine the modernist notion of the genius as autonomous and male in favor of a feminine, domestic, and collaborative conception of genius. (shrink)

Neural fetal tissue transplantation offers promise as a treatment for devasting neurologic conditions such as Parkinson's disease. Two types of issues arise from this procedure: those associated with the use of fetuses, and those associated with the use of neural tissue. The former issues have been examined in many forums; the latter have not. This paper reviews issues and arguments raised by the use of fetal tissue in general, but focuses on the implications of the use of neural tissue for (...) basic concepts of personnood and personal identity. (shrink)

This book discuss the key concepts that philosophers and generals of this era developed to grasp and influence the dramatic and horrific phenomenon of war.

The central theme of John Locke's Of the Conduct of the Understanding is human error. The Conduct was conceived as an additional chapter to An Essay concerning Understanding, but it was never finished and published posthumously in 1706 as a separate work. Modern authors have regarded the Conduct as an educational treatise. Indeed, the analysis in this work of the nature and causes of error and the ways to prevent and remedy error gives rise to numerous educational reflections. However, the (...) aim of the present article is to show that these views should be understood within the specific epistemological context of a two-stage analysis of ideas, the first stage consisting of individual ideas that should all be clear and distinct, and the second stage consisting of reasonings based on combinations of these ideas. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The editor’s General Introduction is divided into two parts. The first part, ‘Context’, discusses Locke’s analysis of the nature of error, the causes of error and the prevention and cure of error in the Conduct. His enquiry is placed in the context of his way of ideas as given in his Essay concerning Human Understanding. Locke’s two-stage way of ideas, his occupation with our mental faculties and with method form the interrelated main ingredients of his logic of ideas. There is (...) a complicated relation of continuity and change between the content and the structure of this new logic on the one hand and the content and structure of works by both scholastic predecessors and novel philosophers on the other hand. Once this context is taken into account, the Conduct can be understood as work that has a function within the structure of Locke’s logic of ideas that runs parallel to the function of the De sophisticis elenchis in the Aristotelian Organon. The second part of the General Introduction, ‘Text’, gives a description of the relevant MSS, an overview of references to the Conduct in Locke’s correspondence, a history of the genesis of the Conduct until its first publication in 1706 in the Posthumous Works, an analysis of the evidence provided by the MSS on how the Conduct grew out of the Essay, and a statement of the principles that underlie the present editon. (shrink)

This book critically reflects upon how images are mobilised within certain knowledge traditions, beyond the established categories of art, scientific visualisations and religious images. Thinking through and with images across ages, the authors seek to expand our understanding of the relationship between the visual and the epistemic.

Epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to educate them about the nature of their oppression. I argue that epistemic exploitation is marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor. The coercive and exploitative aspects of the phenomenon are exemplified by the unpaid nature of the educational labor and its associated opportunity costs, the double bind that marginalized persons must navigate when faced with the demand to educate, and the need for additional labor created by the default (...) skepticism of the privileged. I explore the connections between epistemic exploitation and the two varieties of epistemic injustice that Fricker (2007) identifies, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. I situate epistemic exploitation within Dotson’s (2012; 2014) framework of epistemic oppression, and I address the role that epistemic exploitation plays in maintaining active ignorance and upholding dominant epistemic frameworks. (shrink)

Philosophers have predominantly regarded morality and aesthetics judgments as fundamentally different. However, whether this claim is empirically founded has remained unclear. In a novel task, we measured brain activity of participants judging the aesthetic beauty of artwork or the moral goodness of actions depicted. To control for the content of judgments, participants assessed the age of the artworks and the speed of depicted actions. Univariate analyses revealed whole-brain corrected, content-controlled common activation for aesthetics and morality judgments in frontopolar, dorsomedial and (...) ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Temporoparietal cortex showed activation specific for morality judgments, occipital cortex for aesthetics judgments. Multivariate analyses revealed both common and distinct whole-brain corrected representations for morality and aesthetics judgments in temporoparietal and prefrontal regions. Overall, neural commonalities are more pronounced than predominant philosophical views would predict. They are compatible with minority accounts that stress commonalities between aesthetics and morality judgments, such as sentimentalism and a valuation framework. (shrink)

Structural gaslighting arises when conceptual work functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license. This paper examines the role that structural gaslighting plays in white feminist methodology and epistemology using Fricker’s (2007) discussion of hermeneutical injustice as an illustration. Fricker’s work produces structural gaslighting through several methods: i) the outright denial of the role that structural oppression plays in producing interpretive harm, ii) the use of single-axis conceptual resources to (...) understand intersectional oppression, and iii) the failure to recognize the legacy of women of color’s epistemic resistance work surrounding the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. I argue that Fricker’s whitewashed discussion of epistemic resistance to sexual harassment in the United States is a form of structural gaslighting that fails to treat women of color as knowers and exemplifies the strategic forgetting that is a central methodological tactic of white feminism. (shrink)

This incisive study concerns the ways in which theological claims about creation's original and final perfection shape social ethics. Schuurman argues that prominent 20th century theologians Emil Brunner and Jurgen Moltmann wrongly envision the eschaton as radically discontinuous with creation, and that this discontinuity coheres with serious inadequacies in their social ethics. His thesis is that continuity between creation and eschaton is necessary if Christian social ethics is to avoid dualistic understandings of love and justice, personal and impersonal values, (...) church and world, revolutionism and conservatism. Schuurman establishes theological groundwork for a social ethic that calls for continuous transformation of social institutions and structures.". (shrink)

Background: Nurses need moral courage to ensure ethically good care. Moral courage is an individual characteristic and therefore it is relevant to examine its association with nurses’ socio-demographic factors. Objective: To describe nurses’ self-assessed level of moral courage and its association with their socio-demographic factors. Research design: Quantitative descriptive cross-sectional study. The data were collected with Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale and analyzed statistically. Participants and research context: A total of 482 registered nurses from a major university hospital in Southern Finland (...) completed the Finnish language version of Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale in autumn 2017. Ethical considerations: Ethical approval was obtained from the university ethics committee and permission for the data collection from the participating hospital. Ethical principles and scientific guidelines were followed throughout the research process. Findings: Nurses’ self-assessed level of moral courage was rather high. On Visual Analogy Scale (0–10), the mean value was 8.20 and the mean score of the four dimensional, 21-item Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale was 4.09 on a 5-point Likert-type scale. Respondents’ gender, present work role, ethical knowledge base, additional ethics education, self-study as a means to acquire ethical knowledge, and frequency of work situations needing moral courage were statistically significantly associated with nurses’ moral courage. Discussion: Strongest association was found between nurses’ higher moral courage level and formal and informal ethics education. Honesty and patient’s humane and dignified encounter received the highest scores indicating respondents’ internalization of the core values of nursing. Conclusion: Although nurses were fairly morally courageous, moral courage should be a part of nurses’ basic and continuing education thus covering its theoretical and practical learning. Since moral courage is a virtue that can be taught, learnt, and practiced, education is a relevant way to maintain and further strengthen nurses’ moral courage. (shrink)

Traditionally, empiricism has relied on the specialness of human observation, yet science is rife with sophisticated instrumentation and techniques. The present article advances a conception of empirical evidence applicable to actual scientific practice. I argue that this conception elucidates how the results of scientific research can be repurposed across diverse epistemic contexts: it helps to make sense of how evidence accumulates across theory change, how different evidence can be amalgamated and used jointly, and how the same evidence can be used (...) to constrain competing theories in the service of breaking local underdetermination. (shrink)

Epistemologies have power. They have the power not only to transform worlds, but to create them. And the worlds that they create can be better or worse. For many people, the worlds they create are predictably and reliably deadly. Epistemologies can turn sacred land into ‘resources’ to be bought, sold, exploited, and exhausted. They can turn people into ‘labor’ in much the same way. They can not only disappear acts of violence but render them unnamable and unrecognizable within their conceptual (...) architectures. Settler systems of epistemic and conceptual resources and the relations among them are constructed to preclude certain forms of knowledge. This is not an accident; it is a central goal of colonial violence. Colonization and land dispossession would not be possible without the violent disruption of Indigenous knowledge systems and ongoing organized attempts to disrupt their survival. Violently disrupting the relationships of people to land is as much an epistemic project as it is a material one, and these two projects are inherently linked. The task of theorizing epistemic oppression is not only about epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression is a story that gives language to a phenomenon in order to get past it, to carry on with the maintaining and reviving the forms of Indigenous and diasporic knowledge that colonialism has worked tirelessly to corrupt and silence. (shrink)

Recent developments in AI programming allow for new applications: individualized chatbots which mimic the speaking and writing behaviour of one specific living or dead person. ‘Deathbots’, chatbots of the dead, have already been implemented and are currently under development by the first start-up companies. Thus, it is an urgent issue to consider the ethical implications of deathbots. While previous ethical theories of deathbots have always been based on considerations of the dignity of the deceased, I propose to shift the focus (...) on the dignity and autonomy of the bereaved users of deathbots. Drawing on theories of internet-scaffolded affectivity and on theories of grief, I argue that deathbots may have a negative impact on the grief process of bereaved users and therefore have the potential to limit the emotional and psychological wellbeing of their users. Deathbot users are likely to become dependent on their bots which may make them susceptible to surreptitious advertising by deathbot providing companies and may limit their autonomy. At the same time, deathbots may prove to be helpful for people who suffer from prolonged, severe grief processes. I caution against the unrestricted usage of deathbots and suggest that they should be classified as medical devices. This classification would not the least mean that their non-harm, as well as their helpfulness for people suffering from prolonged grief needs to be proven and that their potential for autonomy infringements is reduced. (shrink)

Causal structuralism is the view that, for each natural, non-mathematical, non-Cambridge property, there is a causal profile that exhausts its individual essence. On this view, having a property’s causal profile is both necessary and sufficient for being that property. It is generally contrasted with the Humean or quidditistic view of properties, which states that having a property’s causal profile is neither necessary nor sufficient for being that property, and with the double-aspect view, which states that causal profile is necessary but (...) not sufficient. Shoemaker’s (1998) and Hawthorne’s (2001) arguments in favor of causal structuralism primarily focus on problematic consequences of the other two views. I argue, however, that causation does not provide an appropriate framework within which to characterize all physical properties for two main reasons. First, there are physical properties that do not have causal profiles and properties whose causal profiles do not exhaust their essences. Second, there is no unified notion of causation across the sciences. After distinguishing between the causal and the nomological, I suggest that what is needed is a structuralist view of properties that is not merely causal but that incorporates a physical property’s higher-order mathematical and nomological properties into its identity conditions. Such a view retains the naturalistic motivations for causal structuralism while avoiding the problems it faces. (shrink)

... composed by Herms Niel as a Durchhaltefanfare, a fanfare of perseverance, for the German troops that had been surrounded on the Crimea peninsula by ...

Many of the demands being voiced for a "humanizing" of health care center on the public's concern that they have some say In determining what happens to the individual in health care institutions. The essays in this volume address fundamental questions of conflicts of rights and autonomy as they affect four selected, controversial areas in health care ethics: the Limits of Professional Autonomy, Refusing! Withdrawing from Treatment, Electing "Heroic" Measures, and Advancing Reproductive Technology. Each of the topics is addressed in (...) such a way that it includes an examination of the locus of responsibility for ethical decision making. The topics are not intended to exhaustively review those areas of health care provision where conflicts of rights might be said to be an issue. Rather they constitute an examination of the difficulties so often encountered in these specific contexts that we hope will illuminate similar conflicts in other problem areas by raising the level of the reader's moral awareness. Many books in bioethics appeal only to a limited audience in spite of the fact that their subject matter is of deep personal concern to everyone. In part, this is true because they are frequently written from the perspective of a single discipline or a single profession. As a result, one is often left with the impression that such a book views the philosophical, historical, and! or theological problems as essentially indifferent to clinical, legal, and! or policy-making problems. (shrink)

RésuméDans cet article, j'analyse des passages cruciaux de la composition finale du théologien Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Al-Maṭālib al-῾āliya, afin de théoriser sur la nature de deux de ses études : la cosmologie et l'angélologie. En cherchant à prouver l'existence de ces êtres, Rāzī divise la réalité en deux domaines : matériel et intelligible. Les anges, qui symbolisent les intellects et les sphères, existent dans une réalité intelligible comme des êtres qui n'occupent pas d'espace. Parmi eux, certains sont associés aux corps (...) célestes, et d'autres ne s'associent à aucune chose matérielle. Dans un deuxième temps, je présente des arguments suggérant que Rāzī pensait peut-être que ces êtres célestes sont prééternels avec Dieu. Ces conceptions montrent une continuité avec la tradition philosophique islamique, et elles la structure philosophique de la réalité intégrée par al-Ġazālī dans quelques textes théologiques. De plus, on a examiné d'autres courants philosophiques développés dans le monde islamique qui ont pu agir sur la cosmologie de Rāzī, en lien avec la tradition hermétique et avec les Épîtres des frères de la Pureté. (shrink)

Philosophers have predominantly regarded morality and aesthetics judgments as fundamentally different. However, whether this claim is empirically founded has remained unclear. In a novel task, we measured brain activity of participants judging the aesthetic beauty of artwork or the moral goodness of actions depicted. To control for the content of judgments, participants assessed the age of the artworks and the speed of depicted actions. Univariate analyses revealed whole-brain corrected, content-controlled common activation for aesthetics and morality judgments in frontopolar, dorsomedial and (...) ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Temporoparietal cortex showed activation specific for morality judgments, occipital cortex for aesthetics judgments. Multivariate analyses revealed both common and distinct whole-brain corrected representations for morality and aesthetics judgments in temporoparietal and prefrontal regions. Overall, neural commonalities are more pronounced than predominant philosophical views would predict. They are compatible with minority accounts that stress commonalities between aesthetics and morality judgments, such as sentimentalism and a valuation framework. (shrink)

Moral change in a historical perspective is a prominent theme in narrative literature, but this dimension of our moral lives has been left in the shade of what I call a context sensitive universalism that guides the mainstream of moral philosophical readings of literature after Nussbaum, Murdoch, Diamond and Cavell among others. Focalizing Robert Pippin’s reading of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, this paper addresses literature as a place for philosophical exploration of the historicity of morality, and argues (...) for making more space for the facticity of change in ethics and ethical readings of literature, not least as a necessary prerequisite for both individual and collective moral self-understanding. (shrink)

through examining the case of Doris Lessing’s varying accounts of her mother, I discuss here the fundamental fact/value entanglement involved in describing people, human situations, and human relations. A serious consideration of the ethical and epistemic challenges involved in biographical narration will provide strong reasons for jettisoning the fact/value dichotomy when thinking about human life.1 Yet, I do not propose such considerations as providing an overall model for rejecting the fact/value dichotomy, but rather suggest that there may be no formal (...) unity to the various considerations that speak against upholding a fact/value dichotomy in different philosophical discussions. Furthermore, seeking such unity .. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to an ongoing and controversial debate about non-conceptuality in Kantian aesthetics. It is a replica on a paper of Dietmar Heidemann in Con-Textos Kantianos N.° 12, to which I do consent, but I’d like to give some additional comments on a specific issue: I show in this paper that the problem about whether or not the understanding contributes to aesthetic judgment can be elucidated by means of a revaluation of the imagination’s capacity of formal representation (...) and the subsuming activity of the power of reflective judgment. I argue that the understanding is considered by the power of reflective judgment merely in his lawfulness in order to find a universal under which the imagination’s particular, the formal representation of the beautiful shape, can be subsumed. (shrink)

SummaryIn the present article it is argued that Pieter de la Court's Political Maxims of the State of Holland presented a remarkably consistent grand strategy for Holland in relation to its Dutch allies and the European powers. I present an outline of this strategy, which was built around the accomplishment and defence of commercial goals; I sketch a historical context that takes into account the general historical shift from tribute-taking agrarian societies towards commercial wealth-generating polities, and also the violent contemporary (...) military and ideological background against which De la Court's strategy stands out; I argue that his strategy can be understood by his use of three basic game theoretic concepts ; and I stress the distinctive character of De la Court's work, by comparing the practical and strategic use of these concepts in the Maxims with the function of the same concepts in the philosophical contract theories of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza. (shrink)

The authors consider the relationship between knowledge and image, though multi-faceted, to be one of reciprocal dependence. But how do images carry and convey knowledge? The ambiguities of images means that interpretations do not necessarily follow the intention of the image producers. Through an array of different cases, the chapters critically reflect upon how images are mobilised and used in different knowledge practices, within certain knowledge traditions, in different historical periods. They question what we take for granted, what seems evident, (...) what goes without saying. This approach spans across established categories such as «scientific imaging», «religious images» and «artworks», and considers how images may contribute meaning across such categories. (shrink)

There is good reason to believe that scientific realism requires a commitment to the objective modal structure of the physical world. Causality, equilibrium, laws of nature, and probability all feature prominently in scientific theory and explanation, and each one is a modal notion. If we are committed to the content of our best scientific theories, we must accept the modal nature of the physical world. But what does the scientific realist’s commitment to physical modality require? We consider whether scientific realism (...) is compatible with Humeanism about the laws of nature, and we conclude that it is not. We specifically identify three major problems for the best-systems account of lawhood: its central concept of strength cannot be formulated non-circularly, it cannot offer a satisfactory account of the laws of the special sciences, and it can offer no explanation of the success of inductive inference. In addition, Humeanism fails to be naturalistically motivated. For these reasons, we conclude that the scientific realist must embrace natural necessity. (shrink)