This book provides an introduction to postphenomenology, an emerging school of thought in the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies, which addresses the relationships users develop with the devices they use.

Foucault's intellectual indebtedness to Nietzsche is apparent in his writing, yet the precise nature, extent, and nuances of that debt are seldom explored. Foucault himself seems sometimes to claim that his approach is essentially Nietzschean, and sometimes to insist that he amounts to a radical break with Nietzsche. This volume is the first of its kind, presenting the relationship between these two thinkers on elements of contemporary culture that they shared interests in, including the nature of life in the modern (...) world, philosophy as a way of life, and the ways in which we ought to read and write about other philosophers. The contributing authors are leading figures in Foucault and Nietzsche studies, and their contributions reflect the diversity of approaches possible in coming to terms with the Foucault-Nietzsche relationship. Specific points of comparison include Foucault and Nietzsche's differing understandings of the Death of God; art and aesthetics; power; writing and authorship; politics and society; the history of ideas; genealogy and archaeology; and the evolution of knowledge. (shrink)

In _Pharmaceutical Freedom_ Professor Flanigan argues we ought to grant people self-medication rights for the same reasons we respect people’s right to give (or refuse to give) informed consent to treatment. Despite being the most comprehensive argument in favour of self-medication written to date, Flanigan’s _Pharmaceutical Freedom_ leaves a number of questions unanswered, making it unclear how the safe-guards Flanigan incorporates to protect people from harming themselves would work in practice. In this paper, I extend Professor Flanigan’s account by discussing (...) a hypothetical case to illustrate how these safe-guards could work together to protect people from harms caused by their own ignorance or incompetence. (shrink)

“Racial Justice Requires Ending the War on Drugs” is an impressively well evidenced argument for the need for drug reform. The authors outline how the war on drugs caus...

This essay maintains that the logical distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ does not amount to a dichotomy between the natural order and the moral, or between speculative knowledge and practical. This essay thus clarifies an important and often misunderstood aspect of the natural law theory advanced by the Grisez School. While affirming the logical distinction of ‘is’ from ‘ought’, this essay attempts to argue that the principles of the moral order have a basis in human nature insofar as human nature (...) delimits the parameters of what is fulfilling for human persons. Furthermore, it is through the experience of one’s nature that one inductively grasps by a non-inferential insight the practical principles whose integral directiveness leads one to human fulfillment. The non-practical awareness of factual data one grasps in experience and which ground such a non-inferential practical insight is distinct from and more basic than reflexive, propositional, speculative knowledge (‘speculative knowledge proper’). Thus, practical understanding supposes some non-practical knowledge, although the non-practical knowledge supposed differs from speculative knowledge as ordinarily understood. Still, while the understanding of practical principles does not presuppose speculative knowledge proper, such speculative knowledge does contribute to practical reasoning in significant ways by supplying content crucial for adequate deliberation. (shrink)

In light of the variety of uses of the term autonomy in recent bioethics literature, in this paper, I suggest that competence, not being as contested, is better placed to play the anti-paternalistic role currently assigned to autonomy. The demonstration of competence, I will argue, can provide individuals with robust spheres of non-interference in which they can pursue their lives in accordance with their own values. This protection from paternalism is achieved by granting individuals rights to non-interference upon demonstration of (...) competence. In this paper, I present a risk-sensitive account of competence as a means of grounding rights to non-interference. On a risk-sensitive account of competence individuals demonstrate their competence by exercising three capacities to the extent necessary to meet a threshold determined by the riskiness of the decision. These three capacities are the capacity to acquire knowledge, use instrumental rationality, and form and revise a life plan. (shrink)

Beyond Reason and Tolerance argues that to prepare students to engage political, ethnic, and religious differences, higher education must adopt a developmental model for a formative and liberal undergraduate education as a process of growth involving empathy as well as reasoning, values as well as knowledge, and identity as well as competencies.

It is a common refrain amongst phenomenologists, disability theorists, and feminist legal theorists that medical practice pays insufficient attention to people’s embodiment. The complaint that we take insufficient account of people’s embodiment isn’t limited to the clinical interaction. It has also been directed at healthcare regulation and welfare policy. In this paper, I examine the arguments for taking embodiment seriously in both medical practice and welfare policy, concluding we have good reasons to take better account of people’s embodiment. I then (...) set out two challenges to taking embodiment seriously in public policy. First, given the amount of variation in how people are embodied, there is strong possibility that adjusting policy to benefit particular individuals based on an appreciation of their embodied experiences could be detrimental towards other individuals. The second challenge concerns how to ensure that people’s testimony about their first-person embodied experience is subject to adequate scrutiny without this resulting in epistemic injustice. I argue that the solution to both of these challenges is to devise a just procedure for soliciting people’s testimony and taking it into account in the policy development process. As such, I also provide an outline of what a just procedure should look like. (shrink)

The state currently grants the medical profession a monopolistic entitlement on the legal use of medical technology. As physicians are duty bound to not expose people to medically unnecessary harm, individuals who wish to engage in Body Modification Practices are effectively precluded from doing so as only physicians are legally entitled to use medical technology. In this article, I argue this is incompatible with respect for persons. Abolishing the medical monopoly allows us to meet the demands of respect for persons (...) by granting access to technology, whilst still upholding physicians’ right to refuse to provide requested services and thereby determine the boundaries of their profession according to what they consider to be the internal morality of medicine. (shrink)

In response to growing concern in the 1980s about the quality of public education across the United States, a tremendous amount of energy was expended by organizations such as the Holmes Group and the Carnegie Forum to organize professional development schools or “partner schools” for teacher education. On the surface, the concept of partnering is simple; however, the practice is very costly, complex, and difficult. In _Schooling, Democracy, and the Quest for Wisdom_, Robert V. Bullough, Jr. and John R. (...) Rosenberg examine the concept of partnering through various lenses and they address what they think are the major issues that need to be, but rarely are, discussed by thousands of educators in the U.S. who are involved and invested in university-public school partnerships. Ultimately, they assert that the conversation around partnering needs re-centering, refreshing, and re-theorizing. (shrink)

This article argues against the relevance of the enhancement/treatment and biomedical/non-biomedical enhancement distinctions by analysing their validity in two ways: their clarity and whether they track our intuitions regarding what is permissible and impermissible. The treatment/enhancement distinction is found to be deficient in both respects. The biomedical/non-biomedical distinction, whilst clear, does not track our intuitions regarding what is permissible and impermissible. The article concludes that, in order to help the enhancement medicine debate, the distinctions should be abandoned due to the (...) fact they hinder clear ethical analysis. (shrink)

Most lymphocytes of the T cell lineage develop along the CD4/CD8 pathway and express antigen receptors on their surfaces consisting of clonotypic αβ chains associated with invariant CD3‐γδε components and ζ chains, collectively referred to as the T cell antigen receptor complex (TCR). Expression of the TCR complex is dynamically regulated during T cell development, with immature CD4+CD8+ thymocytes expressing only 10% of the number of αβ TCR complexes on their surfaces expressed by mature CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. Recent (...) evidence demonstrates that low surface TCR density on CD4+CD8+ thymocytes results from the limited survival of a single TCR component within the ER, the TCRα chain, which has a half life of only 15 minutes in immature thymocytes, compared to >75 minutes in mature T cells. Instability of TCRα proteins in immature CD4+CD8+ thymocytes represents a novel mechanism by which expression of the multisubunit TCR complex is quantitatively regulated during T cell development. In the current review we discuss our recent findings concerning the assembly, intracellular transport, and expression of αβ TCR complexes in CD4+CD8+ thymocytes and comment on the functional significance of TCRα instability during T cell development. (shrink)

Previous studies have documented the fallibility of attempts by surrogates and physicians to act in a substituted judgment capacity and predict end-of-life treatment decisions on behalf of patients. We previously reported that physicians misperceive their patients' preferences and substitute their own preferences for those of their patients with respect to four treatments: cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the event of cardiac arrest, ventilator for an indefinite period of time, medical nutrition and hydration for an indefinite period of time, and hospitalization in the (...) event of pneumonia. (shrink)

Thinkers from a variety of fields analyze the roles of imaging technologies in science and consider their implications for many issues, from our conception of selfhood to the authority of science. In what follows, I encourage scholars to develop an applied philosophy of imaging, that is, to collect these analyses of scientific imaging and to reflect on how they can be made useful for ongoing scientific work. As an example of this effort, I review concepts developed in Don Ihde’s phenomenology (...) of technology and refigure them for use in the analysis of scientific practice. These concepts are useful for drawing out the details of the interpretive frameworks scientists bring to laboratory images. Next, I apply these ideas to a contemporary debate in neurobiology over the interpretation of images of neurons which have been frozen at the moment of transmitter release. This reveals directions for further thought for the study of neurotransmission. (shrink)

A discussion is emerging within the contemporary philosophy of technology over issues of discrimination through design. My suggestion is that a productive way to approach this topic is through a combination of insights from the postphenomenological and critical constructivist perspectives. In particular, I recommend that we build on the postphenomenological notion of “multistability” and conceive of instances of discrimination through design as a kind of discriminatory “stability,” one possible instantiation of a device that could be usefully contrasted with others. Through (...) the adoption of ideas from critical constructivism and postphenomenology, it is possible to draw out some of the features of discriminatory stabilities, including how systems of bias can go unnoticed, especially by those not targeted by them. These ideas could be of use in the identification of ways that unjust systematic biases become set within dominant culture, designed into technologies, sedimented within individual bodily-perceptual habits, and even constructed into prevailing senses of reason. As a practical contribution to this ongoing discussion, I identify a distinction that can be made between two broad categories of discrimination via technology: 1. that occurring along what could be called “an axis of difference,” and 2. “an axis of usage.” In the former, discriminatory efforts occur as different users are advantaged and disadvantaged by a device, even as they use it for similar purposes. In the latter, discriminatory effects occur as the particular usage of a technology preferred by a vulnerable group is shut down through design choices. Although the various emerging discussions on technology and discrimination each tend to gravitate toward analysis along one of these axes, it will of course be important to keep our eyes on the variety of ways that biases are faced by the vulnerable. (shrink)

Although clinical ethics consultation is a high-stakes endeavor with an increasing prominence in health care systems, progress in developing standards for quality is challenging. In this article, we describe the results of a pilot project utilizing portfolios as an evaluation tool. We found that this approach is feasible and resulted in a reasonably wide distribution of scores among the 23 submitted portfolios that we evaluated. We discuss limitations and implications of these results, and suggest that this is a significant step (...) on the pathway to an eventual certification process for clinical ethics consultants. (shrink)

How should we understand postphenomenological methodology? Postphenomenology is a research perspective which builds on phenomenological and pragmatist philosophy to explore human–technology relations, but one with open methodological questions. Here, I offer some thoughts on the epistemological processes that should be (and often implicitly may be) at work in this research. In particular, I am concerned with postphenomenological research on technological “multistability,” i.e., a device’s ever-present capacity to be used for a variety of purposes, and to always be meaningful in multiple (...) ways. I develop a methodology called “variational cross-examination,” which entails the critical contrast of a device’s various stabilities. As a set of instructive examples, I draw on my own line of research on the politics of public spaces, and especially the critique of anti-homeless design. (shrink)

The emerging school of thought called “postphenomenology” offers a distinct understanding of the ways that people experience technology usage. This perspective combines insights from the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with commitments to the anti-essentialism and nonfoundationalism of American pragmatism. One of postphenomenology’s central positions is that technologies always remain “multistable,” i.e., subject to different uses and meanings. But I suggest that as this perspective matures, philosophical problems are emerging around the notion of multistability, what I call “the problem of invariance” (...) and “the problem of grounding.” These problems point out things that remain unclear within the postphenomenological framework, such as how it handles structural claims regarding a technology’s various stabilities, and how it grounds its claims. How can postphenomenology make structural claims about technology and yet remain anti-essentializing? And on what epistemological basis does it ground its claims about human-technology relations? The paper concludes with a series of prescriptions that, if followed, enable postphenomenology to make edifying claims about technology, all while avoiding the problems of invariance and grounding, and maintaining its commitments to anti-essentialism and nonfoundationalism. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that since it would be absurd to outlaw passenger conversation, we should not regulate the presumably equivalent act of using the phone while driving. To reveal the spuriousness of this argument and to help urge drivers to refrain from using the phone while behind the wheel, we must draw on two decades of data on smartphone-induced driving impairment, and we need to consider ideas from both the postphenomenological and embodied cognition perspectives. In what follows, I expand (...) on the notion of the “cognitive niche” and develop the corollary notion of the “experiential niche” to describe how our surroundings can prompt a particular phenomenological quality and organization to our lived experience. I argue that conceiving of the car as a cognitive-experiential niche is useful for articulating the crucial differences between passenger and smartphone conversation and helps make the case that we must regulate smartphone use while driving. (shrink)

It can sometimes be difficult to think about “everyday” objects, those things we are so familiar with that they become taken-for-granted aspects of the backdrop of our world. But what if those objects, despite their everydayness, are politically fraught and call for closer examination? I suggest that insights from two contemporary perspectives, postphenomenology and actor-network theory, are useful for drawing out the experiential, social, and political dynamics of everyday things. In this paper, I review and resituate several key concepts from (...) these two theoretical frameworks and outline a method for using them together for the evaluation of technology. As a guiding example, I explore a paradigmatic everyday device: fire hydrants. Despite their everyday character, hydrants fulfill multiple social roles, some of them loaded with difficult and important political implications. (shrink)

Contemporary scientific research and public policy are not in agreement over what should be done to address the dangers that result from the drop in driving performance that occurs as a driver talks on a cellular phone. One response to this threat to traffic safety has been the banning in a number of countries and some states in the USA of handheld cell phone use while driving. However, research shows that the use of hands-free phones (such as headsets and dashboard-mounted (...) speakers) also accompanies a drop, leading some to recommend regulation of both kinds of mobile phones. In what follows, I draw out the accounts of the driving impairment associated with phone use implicit in research and policy and develop an alternative account grounded in philosophical considerations. Building on work in a school of thought called postphenomenology, I review and expand concepts useful for articulating human bodily and perceptual relations to technology. By applying these ideas to the case of driving while talking on the phone, I offer an account of the drop in driving performance which focuses on the embodied relationships users develop with the car and the phone, and I consider implications for research and policy. (shrink)

An emerging philosophical perspective called “postphenomenology,” which offers reflection upon human relations to technology, has the potential to increase our understanding of the functions performed by imaging technologies in scientific practice. In what follows, I review some relevant insights and expand them for use in the concrete analysis of practices of image interpretation in science. As a guiding example, I explore how these insights bear upon a contemporary debate in space science over images of the fossilized remains of a river (...) delta on the surface of Mars. These considerations include an analysis of the ways that the objects of study are transformed by the mediating imaging technologies, such as the Mars Orbiter Camera. (shrink)

The postphenomenological framework of concepts—and especially the version utilized by the founder of this school of thought, Don Ihde—has proven useful for puncturing others’ totalizing or otherwise overgeneralizing claims about technology. However, does this specialization in deflating hype leave this perspective unable to identify the kinds of technological patterns necessary for contributing to activist interventions and political critique? Put differently, the postphenomenological perspective is committed to the study of concrete human-technology relations, and it eschews essentialist and fundamentalizing accounts of technology. (...) Do these commitments render it incapable of providing general assessments of our contemporary technological situation? It is my contention that this perspective can indeed be useful for these kinds of critical projects. To do so, we must go beyond Ihde’s personal tendency to utilize postphenomenology mostly for deflating others’ hype, and explore this perspective’s distinctive potential for identifying ways that technologies can become set within problematic patterns of usage and design. My suggestion is that the postphenomenological notion of “multistability” can play a helpful role in these efforts, especially when combined with a conception of local, rather than totalizing, stabilizations of human-technology relationships. (shrink)

In a future world of ubiquitous computing, in which humans interact with computerized technologies even more frequently and in even more situations than today, interface design will have increased importance. One feature of interface that I argue will be especially relevant is what I call abstract relational strategies. This refers to an approach (in both a bodily and conceptual sense) toward the use of a technology, an approach that is general enough to be applied in many different concrete scenarios. Such (...) an abstract manner of approach is relevant, for example, when an interface design for a device to which users are already accustomed is applied to an entirely different device (such as a device used for a completely different purpose). To articulate this idea, I explore the history of keyboards, and consider how the habits of interface with one kind (e.g., piano keyboards) have historically enabled some users to approach other technologies fitted with similar keyboard interface (e.g., typewriters, electronic instrumentation). I conclude by brainstorming ways that abstract relational strategies, applicable to a variety of different devices, will have increased importance in a future world in which computing is even more ubiquitous than today. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor has consistently cited the persistence of illusions--especially the M.

Background Fifteen years have passed since the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in Hong Kong. At that time, there were reports of heroic acts among professionals who cared for these patients, whose bravery and professionalism were highly praised. However, there are concerns about changes in new generation of nursing professionals. Objective We aimed to examine the attitude of nursing students, should they be faced with severe acute respiratory syndrome patients during their future work. Research design A questionnaire survey was (...) carried out to examine the attitude among final-year nursing students to three ethical areas, namely, duty of care, resource allocation, and collateral damage. Ethical considerations This study was carried out in accordance with the requirements and recommendations of the Central Research and Ethics Committee, School of Health Sciences at Caritas Institute of Higher Education. Findings Complete responses from 102 subjects were analyzed. The overwhelming majority (96.1%) did not agree to participate in the intubation of severe acute respiratory syndrome patients if protective measures, that is, N95 mask and gown, were not available. If there were insufficient N95 masks for all the medical, nursing, and allied health workers in the hospital (resource allocation), 37.3% felt that the distribution of N95 masks should be by casting lot, while the rest disagreed. When asked about collateral damage, more than three-quarters (77.5%) said that severe acute respiratory syndrome patients should be admitted to intensive care unit. There was sex difference in nursing students’ attitude toward severe acute respiratory syndrome care during pregnancy and influence of age in understanding intensive care unit care for these patients. Interestingly, 94.1% felt that there should be a separate intensive care unit for severe acute respiratory syndrome patients. Conclusion As infection control practice and isolation facilities improved over the years, relevant knowledge and nursing ethical issues related to infectious diseases should become part of nursing education and training programs, especially in preparation for outbreaks of infectious diseases or distress. (shrink)

Defenders of educational frog dissection tend to emphasize the claim that computer-simulated alternatives cannot replicate the same exact experience of slicing open a frog, with all its queasy and visceral impact. Without denying that point, I argue that this is not the only educational standard against which computer-simulated dissection should be evaluated. When real-world frog dissection is analyzed as a concrete technological practice rather than an assumed ideal, the particular educational advantages distinct to real-world dissection and virtual dissection can be (...) enumerated and compared. Building on the work of John Dewey and Don Ihde, I explore the still-expanding advantages of computer-simulated dissection, and in this proper context of comparison it becomes clear that virtual alternatives are increasingly the more educationally beneficial option. (shrink)

What motives underlie the ways humans interact socially? Are these the same for all societies? Are these part of our nature, or influenced by our environments?Over the last decade, research in experimental economics has emphatically falsified the textbook representation of Homo economicus. Literally hundreds of experiments suggest that people care not only about their own material payoffs, but also about such things as fairness, equity and reciprocity. However, this research left fundamental questions unanswered: Are such social preferences stable components of (...) human nature; or, are they modulated by economic, social and cultural environments? Until now, experimental research could not address this question because virtually all subjects had been university students, and while there are cultural differences among student populations throughout the world, these differences are small compared to the full range of human social and cultural environments. A vast amount of ethnographic and historical research suggests that people's motives are influenced by economic, social, and cultural environments, yet such methods can only yield circumstantial evidence about human motives. Combining ethnographic and experimental approaches to fill this gap, this book breaks new ground in reporting the results of a large cross-cultural study aimed at determining the sources of social preferences that underlie the diversity of human sociality. The same experiments which provided evidence for social preferences among university students were performed in fifteen small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of social, economic and cultural conditions by experienced field researchers who had also done long-term ethnographic field work in these societies. The findings of these experiments demonstrated that no society in which experimental behaviour is consistent with the canonical model of self-interest. Indeed, results showed that the variation in behaviour is far greater than previously thought, and that the differences between societies in market integration and the importance of cooperation explain a substantial portion of this variation, which individual-level economic and demographic variables could not. Finally, the extent to which experimental play mirrors patterns of interaction found in everyday life is traced.The book starts with a succinct but substantive introduction to the use of game theory as an analytical tool and its use in the social sciences for the rigorous testing of hypotheses about fundamental aspects of social behaviour outside artificially constructed laboratories. The results of the fifteen case studies are summarized in a suggestive chapter about the scope of the project. (shrink)

Imaging technologies “transform” an object of study into something we can visually perceive in the form of an image. In science and medicine, imaging technologies enact a large variety of transformations, sometimes changing the spatiality of an object of study, or changing its temporality. I make use of the postphenomenological philosophical perspective, and in particular the work of its founder, Don Ihde, for guidance in exploring the different ways that imaging technologies transform our world in the process of rendering it (...) available to visual perception. The main project of this paper is to develop a provisional categorization of a large variety of image transformations common to science and medicine. (shrink)

Insights from the phenomenological tradition of philosophy can be fruitfully applied to ongoing scientific investigations. In what follows, I review and refine a methodology I have developed for the application of concepts from the phenomenology of technology—concepts which articulate bodily and perceptual relations to technology—to a specific context of scientific practice: debate over the interpretation of laboratory images. As a guiding example, I introduce a case study of a contemporary debate over images of Mars which reveal evidence of fluid movement (...) on the planet’s surface in the last decade. Next, the framework of phenomenological concepts is applied to this example, and contrasts are made with the results of previous case studies. I conclude with reflections on the implications of this perspective for both the use of imaging technologies in scientific research specifically, and for the phenomenology of technology generally. (shrink)

A central question in philosophical and sociological accounts of technology is how the agency of technologies should be conceived, that is, how to understand their constitutive roles in the actions performed by assemblages of humans and artifacts. To address this question, I build on the suggestion that a helpful perspective can be gained by amalgamating “actor-network theory” and “postphenomenological” accounts. The idea is that only a combined account can confront both the nuances of human experiential relationships with technology on which (...) postphenomenology specializes, and also the chains of interactions between numerous technologies and humans that actor-network theory can address. To perform this amalgamation, however, several technical adjustments to these theories are required. The central change I develop here is to the postphenomenological notion of “multistability,” i.e., the claim that a technology can be used for multiple purposes through different contexts. I expand the postphenomenological framework through the development of a method called “variational cross-examination,” which involves critically contrasting the various stabilities of a multistable technology for the purpose of exploring how a particular stability has come to dominate. As a guiding example, I explore the case of the everyday public bench. The agency of this “mundane artifact,” as actor-network theorist Bruno Latour would call it, cannot be accounted for by either postphenomenology or actor-network theory alone. (shrink)

8.3 The consistency proof -- 8.4 Applications of the consistency proof -- 8.5 Second-order arithmetic -- Problems -- Chapter 9: Set Theory -- 9.1 Axioms for sets -- 9.2 Development of set theory -- 9.3 Ordinals -- 9.4 Cardinals -- 9.5 Interpretations of set theory -- 9.6 Constructible sets -- 9.7 The axiom of constructibility -- 9.8 Forcing -- 9.9 The independence proofs -- 9.10 Large cardinals -- Problems -- Appendix The Word Problem -- Index.