Background To investigate attitudes of staff, residents and family members in long-term care towards sex and intimacy among older adults, specifically the extent to which they conceptualise sex and intimacy as a need, a right, a privilege or as a component of overall well-being. Methods The present study was a part of a two-arm mixed-methods cross-sectional study using a concurrent triangulation design. A validated survey tool was developed; 433 staff surveys were collected from 35 facilities across the country. Interviews were (...) conducted with 75 staff, residents and family members. Results It was common for staff, residents and family members to talk about intimacy and sexuality in terms of rights and needs. As well as using the language of needs and rights, it was common for participants to use terms related to well-being, such as fun, happiness or being miserable. One participant in particular described receiving intimate touch as a ‘kind of care’—a particularly useful way of framing the conversation. Conclusion While staff, residents and family frequently used the familiar language of needs and rights to discuss access to intimate touch, they also used the language of well-being and care. Reframing the conversation in this way serves a useful purpose: it shifts the focus from simply meeting minimum obligations to a salutogenic approach—one that focuses on caring for the whole person in order to improve overall well-being and quality of life. No data are available. (shrink)

Background: There is an international trend for frail older adults to move to residential care homes, rather than ageing at home. Residential facilities typically espouse a person-centred philosophy, yet evidence points to restrictive policies and surveillance resulting in increased loneliness and diminished opportunities for intimacy and sexual expression. Residents may experience what has been termed social death, rather than perceive they are related to by others as socially alive. Aim: To consider how the loss of intimacy and sexuality in residents’ (...) lives contributes to iatrogenic loneliness experienced in residential care, and the importance of considering these issues together. Research design: The study utilised a constructionist methodology, investigating the meanings associated with intimacy, loneliness, and ageing. Participants and research context: Qualitative data used in this study are drawn from a larger dataset of a mixed-methods study. Interviews were completed as follows: staff, 21 individual interviews, and two groups with a total of 13 additional people; residents, 26 interviews with 28 people; and family members, 12 interviews with 13 people. Findings: Five key themes were identified in the data analysis: loneliness and relational identity, loneliness and functional relationships, loneliness and disrupted intimacy, loneliness and liminality, and loneliness and the built environment. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by a University Human Ethics Committee. Participation was voluntary. Consent was gained and confidentiality upheld. Discussion: Residents’ expression of intimacy and sexuality can be compromised through paternalism, ageism, restrictive policies, care-rationing and functional care, alienating residents from sustaining and developing significant relationships. Attitudes and cultural beliefs of staff and family members about ageing and intimacy, compounded by architectural design, may intensify loneliness. Conclusions: Nurses have a pivotal role in ensuring policies and practice enhance social citizenship. (shrink)

In the United States, combat veterans are overwhelmingly male. It was not until 2013 that the ban preventing women from serving in combat was removed by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and not until 2016 that women could choose to enlist in Army Ranger School or become a Navy SEAL. Currently, only 6 percent of the veteran population in the United States is female. Why, then, choose combat trauma to show the ways in which our understanding of PTSD is problematically (...) sexist? Why argue that combat trauma is a feminist issue when there are types of trauma that impact women more directly?Combat trauma has proven to be difficult to understand and to... (shrink)

The late Joseph Grange is perhaps the most sharply focused and elegantly lucid of the group of North American philosophers to build new aesthetic metaphysical visions from the legacies of process philosophy and pragmatism. His peers include, among others, George Allan,1 Roger Ames,2 Chung-ying Cheng,3 Robert Corrington,4 Frederick Ferre,5 Warren Frisina,6 David L. Hall,7 Judith Jones,8 Elizabeth Kraus,9 Hugh P. McDonald,10 Steve Odin,11 Sandra Rosenthal,12 Robert Smid,13 David Weissman,14 and myself, along with our many students and colleagues. This (...) group has widely variant systems, yet what unites us is an emphasis on the aesthetic and a lack of the fear to enter deeply into metaphysics when relevant.. (shrink)

This book offers a detailed study of the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza, focussing on their concept of power as potentia, concrete power, rather than power as potestas, authorised power. The focus on power as potentia generates a new conception of popular power. Radical democrats–whether drawing on Hobbes's 'sleeping sovereign' or on Spinoza's 'multitude'–understand popular power as something that transcends ordinary institutional politics, as for instance popular plebsites or mass movements. However, the book argues that these (...) understandings reflect a residual scholasticism which Hobbes and Spinoza ultimately repudiate. Instead, on the book's revisionist conception, a political phenomenon should be said to express popular power when it is both popular (it eliminates oligarchy and encompasses the whole polity), and also powerful (it robustly determines political and social outcomes). Two possible institutional forms that this popular power might take are distinguished: Hobbesian repressive egalitarianism, or Spinozist civic strengthening. But despite divergent institutional proposals, the book argues that both Hobbes and Spinoza share the conviction that there is nothing spontaneously egalitarian or good about human collective existence. From this point of view, the book accuses radical democrats of pernicious romanticism; the slow, meticulous work of organizational design and maintenance is the true centre of popular power. Three minute video summary available via HPBin3. Extended discussion on The Political Theory Review podcast. First chapter open access available via Oxford Scholarship Online. Videos of book talks at National University of Singapore (Centre for Legal Theory) and Universidad de Buenos Aires (Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani) available via YouTube. (See links below.). (shrink)

This work runs counter to the traditional interpretations of Peirce's philosophy by eliciting an inherent strand of pragmatic pluralism that is embedded in the very core of his thought and that weaves his various doctrines into a systematic ...

James articulates and defends a Spinozist view of the interplay between poetry and philosophy: philosophy has an ineliminably poetic content, and poetry is an aid and support to philosophy. In this piece, I juxtapose James’s Spinozist schema with another schema available within Spinoza’s historical milieu. In Ibn Tufayl’s view, rather than poetry being an aid to philosophy, poetry opens to a world of experience that even the best philosophy cannot grasp. For flat-footed philosophers who think that philosophy can in principle (...) have the last word on everything, poetics might give an approximate indication of a kind of experience that lies beyond it. (shrink)

The logics BN4 and E4 can be considered as the 4-valued logics of the relevant conditional and (relevant) entailment, respectively. The logic BN4 was developed by Brady in 1982 and the logic E4 by Robles and Méndez in 2016. The aim of this paper is to investigate the implicative variants (of both systems) which contain Routley and Meyer’s logic B and endow them with a Belnap-Dunn type bivalent semantics.

This paper studies the concept of form of life as central to ordinary language philosophy : philosophy of our language as spoken ; pronounced by a human voice within a form of life. Such an approach to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy shifts the question of the common use of language – central to Wittgenstein’s Investigations – to the definition of the subject as voice, and to the reinvention of subjectivity in language. The voice is both a subjective and common expression: it (...) is what makes it possible for my individual voice, or claim, to become shared and for our forms of life to be intertwined with a lifeform. (shrink)

Unites George Herbert Mead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in a shared rejection of substance philosophy as well as spectator theory of knowledge, in favor of a focus on the ultimacy of temporal process and the constitutive function of social praxis.

The knowledge base of how student engagement affects educational outcomes and career attainment has grown immeasurably in the last decade. This title presents methods to connect and re-engage marginalised, uninterested students.

Some have suggested that Jon Stewart of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (TDS) and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report (TCR) represent a new kind of journalist. We propose, rather, that Stewart and Colbert are imitators who do not fully inhabit the role of journalist. They are interesting because sometimes they do a better job performing the functions of journalism than journalists themselves. However, Stewart and Colbert do not share journalists' moral commitments. Therefore, their performances are neither motivated nor (...) constrained by these commitments. Using a virtue theory framework, we suggest that this distinction between journalists and their imitators is morally significant because it implies differences in the kinds of excellence these moral agents are pursuing in their work. Rather than evaluating the work of Colbert and Stewart in the role of journalists, we propose analyzing their contributions to media ethics in the role of media critics. (shrink)

According to a recent interpretive orthodoxy, Spinoza is a profoundly democratic theorist of state authority. I reject this orthodoxy. To be sure, for Spinoza, a political order succeeds in proportion as it harnesses the power of the people within it. However, Spinoza shows that political inclusion is only one possible strategy to this end; equally if not more useful is political exclusion, so long as it maintains what I call the depoliticised acquiescence of those excluded.

The ethics of care has contributed to modifying a dominant conception of ethics and changed the way we conceive vulnerability. It has introduced ethical stakes into politics, weakening, through its critique of theories of justice, the seemingly obvious link between an ethics of justice and political liberalism. However, care corresponds to a quite ordinary reality: the fact that people look after one another, take care of one another and thus are responsible. The aim of this paper is to connect the (...) ethics of care to the idea of the vulnerability of the human as it is developed in the moral philosophy inspired by Wittgenstein. (shrink)

The place of man in Darwin's development of a theory of transmutation has been obscured by his manner of disclosure. Comparing the 1837–1839 period to his entire career as a theorist suggests that it was Darwin's practice to present himself and his work only before the most select scientific audiences, and then in accordance with their expectations. The negative implications of this rule for his publication on man are clear enough: finding no general invitation in science to publish as a (...) theorist and no contemporary scientific audience for the sorts of inquiries he was making on man, he was silent, at least until such time as he could publish on the strength of reputation alone. Now, with the availability of manuscripts from the early period, what was once hidden stands revealed. It is clear from Darwin's notebooks that man played a dual role in the formation of his theory: as a zoological species to be incorporated into the theory and as the primary vehicle for the study of behavior. On the first score, integrating man into the theory provoked Darwin to break with the traditional view of man's place in nature and to reject a major element in the scientific notion of progressive development. On the second score, the study of behavior led Darwin outside natural history and thence, unexpectedly, to Malthus and natural selection.One is left with the certainty that the subject of man was a central element in Darwin's formulation of his species theory. To an extent, then, the public judgment of Darwin was right all along, for the public had always sensed that Darwin spoke to a larger audience than that formed around science. On the basis of new evidence, we can add that Darwin drew from that larger audience as well. There are of course ironies to this conclusion: that Darwin the professional drew so heavily from fields where he was the amateur, that as a transparent man his inner life should prove so at odds with the manner in which he presented himself, and that his arrival at a strong sense of himself—the revolutionary “I” of his notebooks—should occur just as he stepped beyond science to engage the general culture. But when one considers the inherent difficulties of Darwin's subject and the magnitude of his claims respecting man, these ironies are perhaps not surprising at all but those of a kind which might be anticipated. (shrink)

Peirce’s pragmatic stress on meaning in terms of habits of response is, of course, well known. However, the language in which it is usually expressed tends too often to conflate its epistemic and ontological dimensions, thereby hiding from view its full systematic significance. The following discussion will focus on the emergence of such meanings as epistemic relational structures which embody the characteristics of the dynamics of organism-environment interaction in their very internal structure and which lead outward toward the universe, providing (...) an experienced content which is at once epistemic and ontological. (shrink)

In the course of the last few decades, Bolzano has emerged as an important player in accounts of the history of philosophy. This should be no surprise. Few authors stand at a more central junction in the development of modern thought. Bolzano's contributions to logic and the theory of knowledge alone straddle three of the most important philosophical traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries: the Kantian school, the early phenomenological movement and what has come to be known as analytical (...) philosophy. This paper identifies three Bolzanian theoretical innovations that warrant his inclusion in the analytical tradition: the commitment to ‘logical realism’, the adoption of a substitutional procedure for the purpose of defining logical properties and a new theory of a priori cognition that presents itself as an alternative to Kant's. All three innovations concur to deliver what counts as the most important development of logic and its philosophy between Aristotle and Frege. In the final part of the paper, I defend Bolzano against a common objection and explain that these theoretical innovations are also supported by views on syntax, which though marginal are both workable and philosophically interesting. (shrink)

Entscheidungen der Therapiebegrenzung und in der Betreuung am Lebensende sind häufig komplex und von ethischen Problemen begleitet. Im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung steht die entscheidende Frage, wie hilfreich existierende „Ethik-Richtlinien“, die eine ethische Orientierung bei solchen Entscheidungen geben sollen, in der klinischen Praxis tatsächlich sind. Die Frage, welchen Nutzen „Ethik-Richtlinien“ bei der Entscheidungsfindung haben oder haben können, wird hier exemplarisch an einem klinischen Fallbeispiel aus einer Ethik-Kooperationsstudie in der Intensivmedizin analysiert. Vergleichend werden hierzu „Ethik-Richtlinien“ aus Deutschland, der Schweiz und aus Großbritannien (...) herangezogen, die Gegenstand eines internationalen Projekts zur Analyse von Richtlinien waren. Die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer ethischen Orientierung an „Ethik-Richtlinien“ bei Entscheidungsproblemen der Therapiebegrenzung und in der Betreuung am Lebensende werden anhand der Fallstudie diskutiert und illustriert. Abschließend werden Schlussfolgerungen für die Entwicklung ethischer Richtlinien für die klinische Praxis formuliert. (shrink)

Recent "gender, environment, and sustainable development" accounts raise pointed questions about the complicity of Enlightenment philosophies of science with failures of Third World development policies and the current environmental crisis. The strengths of these analyses come from distinctive ways they link androcentric, economistic, and nature-blind aspects of development thinking to "the Enlightenment dream." In doing so they share perspectives with and provide resources for other influential schools of science studies.

Que chez J. L. Austin le langage soit action n’est pas nouveau. Il est toutefois important de comprendre – et cela est plus radical – comment l’introduction de l’idée des actes de langage transforme non seulement la conception du langage, mais la conception de l’action et fragilise conjointement la signification, et l’action. Chez Austin, c’est le triplet « acte de langage »/« échec »/« excuse » qui est central – j’essaierai à partir de cette articulation de montrer en quel sens, (...) chez Austin, la dimension sociale est cruciale. Dans ce sens, ce travail, bien qu’il ne constitue pas une étude historique en ethnométhodologie, est sans doute guidé par l’idée de l’enquête sociologique héritée de Harold Garfinkel, où l’ordre social n’est pas une réalité indépendante, et où l’on cherche à élucider la fabrication constante de l’ordre social, tel qu’il est reconnaissable, intelligible, analysable et rapportable par les participants. (shrink)

Pierre Hadot, professor of ancient philosophy at the Collège de France, published, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of the earliest work on Wittgenstein to appear in French. Hadot conceived of philosophy as an activity rather than a body of doctrines and found in Wittgenstein a fruitful point of departure for ethical reflection. Hadot's understanding of philosophy as a spiritual exercise — articulated through his reading of ancient philosophy but also the American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph (...) Waldo Emerson — will find an echo in Wittgenstinian thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. Ultimately philosophy for Hadot is a call to personal and political transformation. (shrink)

By combining a flanker task and a cuing task into a single paradigm, the authors assessed the effects of orienting and alerting on conflict resolution and explored how normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) modulate these attentional functions. Orienting failed to enhance conflict resolution; alerting was most beneficial for trials without conflict, as if acting on response criterion rather than on information processing. Alerting cues were most effective in the older groups— healthy aging and AD. Conflict resolution was impaired only (...) in AD. Orienting remained unchanged across groups. These findings provide evidence of different life span developmental and clinical trajectories for each attentional network. (shrink)

For Stanley Cavell, the specific and contemporary theme of the ordinary sets off from America and the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, in order to reinvent itself in Europe with ordinary language philosophy – Wittgenstein and Austin. But in order to understand this, it is necessary to perceive what Cavell calls, inspired by Wittgenstein and Thoreau, “the uncanniness of the ordinary,” inherent to its anthropological thematization. In his preface to the recent work of Veena Das, Life a...

ZusammenfassungSystemmedizinische Ansätze zeichnen sich durch die Integration großer Datenmengen aus vielfältigen Datenquellen aus und führen systembiologische und medizinische Forschungsansätze mit informationswissenschaftlichen Methoden und prädiktiven Verfahren mathematischer Modellierung zusammen. Hieraus resultiert eine enge Kooperation von Ärzten und Naturwissenschaftlern, wobei insbesondere die Expertise nicht-ärztlicher Forscher zunehmend an Bedeutung für die Datenaufbereitung und -interpretation gewinnt. Aus ethischer Perspektive wirft diese Entwicklung Fragen nach der konkreten Gestaltung einer systemmedizinischen Zusammenarbeit sowie möglichen Rollenveränderungen und neuen Verantwortungszuschreibungen an Ärzte und nicht-ärztliche Forscher auf. Um diese Fragen (...) mit Blick auf die Erfahrungen und Perspektiven der beteiligten Akteursgruppen zu beleuchten, führten wir eine qualitative Interviewstudie mit Ärzten und nicht-ärztlichen Forschern aus unterschiedlichen systemmedizinischen Kontexten durch. Aus dem Interviewmaterial ließen sich zwei Konzeptionen von Systemmedizin rekonstruieren. Die erste ist durch eine eindeutige arbeitsteilige Rollentrennung zwischen Ärzten und Forschern charakterisiert: Der Forscher fungiert als Dienstleister, der Arzt als translationaler, interdisziplinär ausgerichteter Mediziner. Die zweite zeichnet sich durch eine weitreichende Aufhebung der Rollentrennung von Ärzten und Forschern aus: Die Berufsgruppen agieren als interdisziplinäres Team mit einer engen wechselseitigen inhaltlichen und methodischen Zusammenarbeit der Akteure. In beiden Konzeptionen werden Rollenkonflikte von Ärzten und Forschern deutlich, die insbesondere auf die Diskrepanz zwischen dem Arzt- und Forscherethos und die mit ihnen je verknüpften spezifischen Handlungsnormen und Ziele zurückzuführen sind. Ferner besteht mit Blick auf die dem Arzt und Forscher jeweils zukommende Verantwortung gegenüber Patienten vielfältiger normativer Klärungsbedarf, insbesondere hinsichtlich der Frage, welche Verantwortung den Akteursgruppen gerechtfertigter Weise zugeschrieben werden kann. Diesbezüglich erscheint eine Differenzierung von versorgungsnäheren und grundlagenforschungsorientierten Arbeitsfeldern angeraten. (shrink)

Kant -- Decomposition -- Meaning and analysis -- A substitutional theory -- Analyticity -- Consequence -- Justification and proof -- A priori knowledge -- Things, collections and numbers -- Frege -- Husserl, logical psychologism, and the theory of knowledge.

My paper focuses on the theme of visibility by teasing out some paradoxes of invisibility. In the ordinary social world, what is said to be invisible is generally what is here, right before our eyes, but to which we pay no attention. Care is invisible because it goes on without us seeing it. By suddenly making visible what is ordinarily invisible, the COVID pandemic has been a strange pedagogical moment, making visible the people who take care of “us”, and revealing (...) our entire society’s ignorance of what allows it to live—whether in the context of everyday life or in the urgency of the risk of death. The grammar of care has thus imposed itself on everyone, because care is never so visible as in those situations where a form of life is shaken. Care work has been revealed as invisible work that keeps everyone going. “Invisible” does not refer to a difficulty in perceiving but rather a refusal to see. A refusal to see something that is not hidden, but which we do not see precisely because it is right before our eyes. Invisibility is thus denial, in both the social and the theoretical realms, especially when care work is envisioned in the terms of the further invisibilization of care work when it is done for the benefit of women as in the “care drain” from poor to rich countries. The asymmetry in the relations between North and South is part of the invisibility of what sustains societies. The invisible chains of care reveal the extent to which the question of service is the fundamental question of social invisibility. (shrink)

I argue that recognizing a human right to adequate food and enforcing it as a legal right is an important way to promote and ensure sustainable food security. I consider objections that have been raised against subsistence rights and socio-economic rights, including the argument that such rights are not feasible, that they are not justiciable, and that they are too amorphous—that it is not clear what is required to fulfill these rights and by whom. I defend the right to adequate (...) food against these objections by considering how this right has been interpreted and applied in international law and how it has been protected in other domestic legal systems. I analyze different dimensions of the right to adequate food and I apply these to recent issues concerning sustainable food security in the United States, such as food deserts. (shrink)