ExcerptNarrative today is a commanding term for individual and group definition. Within literature and literary discussions, narrative structure has been treated in increasingly complex and multifaceted ways. However, as narrative has moved from literature into wider cultural circulation, such multiplicity and complexity can be lost. Narrative is embraced as the form in which experience takes meaningful shape. Each individual or each group has a story as their version of who they are, interpreted in each one’s terms and affirming each one’s (...) right to such interpretation. On the one hand, this promises the airing and sharing of viewpoints and versions on the part of each self or group. On the other hand, certain tendencies and implications of narrative structure close off each version from the others. Narrative can then become a claim to one’s own story in ways that refuse the stories of others. Instead of interchange among many voices in an open forum, what emerge are competitive accounts that deny the validity of the accounts of others. (shrink)

In this book, Shira Weiss elucidates the moral tradition of the Hebrew Bible by subjecting ethically challenging biblical texts to moral philosophical analysis. Examining the most essential questions of Jewish Thought, she uses contemporary philosophy to decipher Scriptural ethics as uncovered from a variety of biblical stories. Aided by ancient, medieval, and contemporary resources, Weiss presents a comprehensive discussion of enduring ethical questions that arise from biblical narrative and continue to be contested in modern times. She shows (...) how such analysis can unsettle assumptions and beliefs, as well as foster moral reflection. Ethical Ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible will be of interest to scholars and students of ethics, philosophy, Jewish thought, biblical theology, and exegesis. (shrink)

An analysis of the contemporary moral debate over price gouging can advance multiple readings of the challenging biblical episode which depicts Jacob's purchase of the birthright. Ethical considerations, such as the maximization of welfare, preservation of choice, and promotion of virtue are evaluated and then applied to the biblical text recounting the sale of Esau's birthright. Did Jacob act ethically in his purchase of ravenous Esau's birthright, or did he seize a propitious opportunity to exploit Esau's predicament? Is Esau responsible (...) for spurning his birthright, or was he misled as he claims Jacob had “supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and, behold, now he has taken away my blessing”? An ethical analysis of Jacob's and Esau's intentions and actions in the transaction uncovers the Bible's position on the sale and on the larger moral debate. (shrink)

The attempts to mitigate the unprecedented health, economic, and social disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are largely dependent on establishing compliance to behavioral guidelines and rules that reduce the risk of infection. Here, by conducting an online survey that tested participants’ knowledge about the disease and measured demographic, attitudinal, and cognitive variables, we identify predictors of self-reported social distancing and hygiene behavior. To investigate the cognitive processes underlying health-prevention behavior in the pandemic, we co-opted the dual-process model of thinking (...) to measure participants’ propensities for automatic and intuitive thinking vs. controlled and reflective thinking. Self-reports of 17 precautionary behaviors, including regular hand washing, social distancing, and wearing a face mask, served as a dependent measure. The results of hierarchical regressions showed that age, risk-taking propensity, and concern about the pandemic predicted adoption of precautionary behavior. Variance in cognitive processes also predicted precautionary behavior: participants with higher scores for controlled thinking (measured with the Cognitive Reflection Test) reported less adherence to specific guidelines, as did respondents with a poor understanding of the infection and transmission mechanism of the COVID-19 virus. The predictive power of this model was comparable to an approach (Theory of Planned Behavior) based on attitudes to health behavior. Given these results, we propose the inclusion of measures of cognitive reflection and mental model variables in predictive models of compliance, and future studies of precautionary behavior to establish how cognitive variables are linked with people’s information processing and social norms. (shrink)

As novas modalidades de operações financeiras realizadas por bancos tradicionais versus suas contrapartes no ambiente virtual, as quais utilizam dados bancários e informações pessoais e sensíveis dos usuários naquilo que se chama de open banking é o tema central do trabalho. Assim, partiu-se de uma definição geral desse termo, declinando sua tentativa de regulação para analisar seu acoplamento com LGPD, concluindo-se da necessidade de uma intervenção do órgão regulador (BACEN) balanceando proteção de dados e aumento da concorrência gerado pelo instituto (...) estudado. A pesquisa bibliográfica foi utilizada e o método dialético foram utilizados pelo prisma da Análise Econômica do Direito. (shrink)

This second volume of Eric Voegelin’s miscellaneous papers contains unpublished writings from the time of his forced emigration from Austria in 1938 until his death in 1985. The volume’s focus is on dialogue and discussion, presenting Voegelin in the role of lecturer, discussant, and respondent. “The Drama of Humanity” presents the Walter Turner Candler Lectures delivered in four parts at Emory University in 1967. This text, a small book in itself, addresses the themes of “The Contemporary Situation,” “Man in the (...) Cosmos,” “The Epiphany of Man,” and “Man in Revolt,” providing the reader with a good introduction to Voegelin’s later work. Another extensive text included in this volume is “Conversations with Eric Voegelin at the Thomas More Institute” in Montreal. These exchanges include lectures and discussions given by Voegelin between 1967 and 1976. A number of other sections offer insight into Voegelin’s intellectual development over a period of forty years. These include the complete “Foreword” to the second edition of _The Political Religions, _which is published here for the first time; “Notes on T. S. Eliot’s _Four Quartets_;” the “Cycle Theory and Disintegrations;” “What Is Political Theory?;” “The Spiritual and Political Future of the Western World;” “Notes on ‘Civilization and Foreign Affairs;’” “Structures of Consciousness;” “The Beyond and Its Parousia;” and the 1983 “Responses at the Panel Discussion of ‘The Beginning of the Beginning.’” Several lengthy excerpts from conference dialogues with other scholars are also included: “The West and the Meaning of Industrial Society,” “Natural Law in Political Theory,” and “Man in Political Institutions.” Volume 33 concludes with Voegelin’s “Autobiographical Statement at the Age of Eighty-Two,” his last public utterance on the course of his life and his life’s work. By choosing dialogue as the focus of this volume, Petropulos and Weiss are able to show not only the extent to which Voegelin engaged in an exchange of ideas but also his abiding concern for the practical and theoretical conditions necessary in order for this exchange to take place. (shrink)

PrécisThe administration of Pre-Mortem Interventions (PMIs) to preserve the opportunity to donate, to assess the eligibility to donate, or to optimize the outcomes of donation and transplantation are controversial as they offer no direct medical benefit and include at least the possibility of harm to the still-living patient. In this article, we describe the legal analysis surrounding consent to PMIs, drawing on existing legal commentary and identifying key legal problems. We provide an overview of the approaches in several jurisdictions that (...) have chosen to explicitly address PMIs within codified law. We then provide, as an example, a detailed exploration of how PMIs are likely to be addressed in one jurisdiction where general medical consent law applies because there is no specific legislation addressing PMIs — the province of Ontario in Canada. (shrink)

Over the last decade, the international media has devoted increasing attention to operations that separate conjoined twins. Despite the fairly low odds that a child or adult will survive the operation with all of their vital organs intact, most people fail to question the urgency of being physically separated from one’s identical twin. The drive to surgically tear asunder that which was originally joined, I suggest, is motivated in part by a refusal to acknowledge intercorporeality as a basic condition of (...) human existence that doesn’t undermine identity but makes it possible in the first place. (shrink)

Science and technology influence international affairs by many different mechanisms. Both create new issues, risks and uncertainties. Advances in science alert the international community to new issues and risks. New technological capabilities transform war, diplomacy, commerce, intelligence, and investment. This paper identifies six basic patterns by which advances in science and technology influence international relations: as a juggernaut or escaped genie with rapid and wide-ranging ramifications for the international system; as a game-changer and a conveyer of advantage and disadvantage to (...) different actors in the international system; as a source of risks, issues and problems that must be addressed and managed by the international community; as key dimensions or enablers of international macro phenomena; as instruments of foreign policy or sources of technical information for the management of an ongoing international regime; as the subject of projects and institutions whose planning, design, implementation and management provide grist for the mill of international relations and diplomacy. (shrink)

Certain expositors of the Tractatus have tried to make sense of Wittegnstein’s curious revocation of its propositions by suggesting that although they lack content, they nonetheless express (“show,” but do not say) some ineffable truths about reality. Such a view Cora Dimaond labels “chickening out.” I attempt to diagnose the lingering attraction of the ‘chicken’ (in this case an attraction to an illusion of sense) by condsidering a (false) parallel with the case of perceptual illusion. To this end, I make (...) a brief excursion into the work of Gareth Evans in order to draw out what the parallel would look like and more specifically how the chicken might be tempted to think that there is indeed such a parallel. In this way, I hope to better ‘understand’ the chicken and her seduction, and in the process make a plea for not “chickening out.” I then turn to a positive consideration of how we should in fact read this work. In particular, I consider Diamond’s idea that the Tractatus requires an “imaginative understanding” of its reader, an ability to ‘think’ oneself into certain philosophical illusions of sense in order to dismantle them from within. I explore exactly what such an imagination involves. In particular, I suggest that it presupposes a kind of ‘metaphysical’ thesis of its own about the nature of human beings and their innermost tendencies, a position, I argue, that Wittegnstein held. (shrink)

Rapid advances and exponential growth in computer and telecommunications technology have taken individual records and papers revealing the most intimate details of one’s life, habits, and genetic predisposition from the private sector into the public arena in derogation of privacy considerations. Although computerized medical information offers a means of streamlining and improving the health care delivery system through speed and enormous storage capacity, it also presents new challenges as it affects the right of privacy and expectation of confidentiality, creating serious (...) ethical and legal issues. Other considerations include constitutional matters such as loss of liberty when one is compelled to remain in an undesirable or unsuitable job so that insurance will not be canceled or the inability to secure another more suitable position due to genetic predisposition and denial of equal protection of the laws if one is stigmatized because one belongs to a certain ethnic or racial group that exhibits a particular genetic propensity. Collateral questions concern the propriety of disclosure of confidential health care information, including genetic data. This article also considers the proposed federal guidelines for a health information privacy law. (shrink)

In this thesis I investigate the implications, for one's account of mathematics, of holding an anti-realist view. The primary aim is to appraise the scope of revision imposed by anti-realism on classical inferential practice in mathematics. That appraisal has consequences both for our understanding of the nature of mathematics and for our attitude towards anti-realism itself. If an anti-realist position seems inevitably to be absurdly revisionary then we have grounds for suspecting the coherence of arguments canvassed in favour of anti-realism. (...) I attempt to defend the anti-realist position by arguing, i) that it is not internally incoherent for anti-realism to be a potentially revisionary position, and ii) that an anti-realist position can, plausibly, be seen to result in a stable intuitionistic position with regard to the logic it condones. The use of impredicative methods in classical mathematics is a site of traditional intuitionistic attacks. I undertake an examination of what the anti-realist attitude towards such methods should be. This question is of interest both because such methods are deeply implicated in classical mathematical theory of analysis and because intuitionistic semantic theories make use of impredicative methods. I attempt to construct the outlines of a set theory which is anti-realistically acceptable but which, although having no antecedent repugnance for impredicative methods as such, appears to be too weak to offer an anti-realistic vindication of impredicative methods in general. I attempt to exonerate intuitionistic semantic theories in their use of impredicative methods by showing that a partial order relying on the nature of our grasp of the intuitionistic meaning stipulations for the logical constants precludes a possible circularity. (shrink)

We propose a critique ofnormativism, defined as the idea that human thinking reflects a normative system against which it should be measured and judged. We analyze the methodological problems associated with normativism, proposing that it invites the controversial “is-ought” inference, much contested in the philosophical literature. This problem is triggered when there are competing normative accounts (the arbitration problem), as empirical evidence can help arbitrate between descriptive theories, but not between normative systems. Drawing on linguistics as a model, we propose (...) that a clear distinction between normative systems and competence theories is essential, arguing that equating them invites an “is-ought” inference: to wit, supporting normative “ought” theories with empirical “is” evidence. We analyze in detail two research programmes with normativist features – Oaksford and Chater's rational analysis and Stanovich and West's individual differences approach – demonstrating how, in each case, equating norm and competence leads to an is-ought inference. Normativism triggers a host of research biases in the psychology of reasoning and decision making: focusing on untrained participants and novel problems, analyzing psychological processes in terms of their normative correlates, and neglecting philosophically significant paradigms when they do not supply clear standards for normative judgement. For example, in a dual-process framework, normativism can lead to a fallacious “ought-is” inference, in which normative responses are taken as diagnostic of analytic reasoning. We propose that little can be gained from normativism that cannot be achieved by descriptivist computational-level analysis, illustrating our position with Hypothetical Thinking Theory and the theory of the suppositional conditional. We conclude that descriptivism is a viable option, and that theories of higher mental processing would be better off freed from normative considerations. (shrink)

This text examines the philosophy of Paul Weiss. Much of Dr Weiss's impact has come through his example, discussions, and such activities as founding and editing the Review of Metaphysics and founding and leading the Metaphysical Society of America.

The quality of phenomenological research in nursing has been a subject of long‐standing debate and critique, but conversation took a particularly contentious turn following publication of John Paley's 2017 Phenomenology as Qualitative Research (Routledge), which elicited strong reactions. Faculty in nursing doctoral programs now face a challenge: in light of current controversies, what can we teach that is appropriately labeled phenomenological, and is there a way to present philosophical concepts that might equip students to avoid the most egregious mistakes of (...) the past? In this article, I suggest that ordinary clinical nursing practice is an inherently phenomenological enterprise, and creative bedside insights belong at the center of our teaching, as they embody an everyday phenomenology which exemplifies core elements of the phenomenological method. Instead of following ever‐more‐precisely elaborated instructional manuals, I propose, our students should begin their studies of phenomenology by returning attention to the way creative insight emerges during routine care. Bedside insights have been rendered invisible by our discipline's valuing of technical proceduralism over artistry in research and by the turn to evidence‐based practice in clinical work, but they are a valuable pathway to learning and should be part of our response to the current crisis. (shrink)

Phonological rules create alternations in the phonetic realizations of related words. These rules must be learned by infants in order to identify the phonological inventory, the morphological structure, and the lexicon of a language. Recent work proposes a computational model for the learning of one kind of phonological alternation, allophony . This paper extends the model to account for learning of a broader set of phonological alternations and the formalization of these alternations as general rules. In Experiment 1, we apply (...) the original model to new data in Dutch and demonstrate its limitations in learning nonallophonic rules. In Experiment 2, we extend the model to allow it to learn general rules for alternations that apply to a class of segments. In Experiment 3, the model is further extended to allow for generalization by context; we argue that this generalization must be constrained by linguistic principles. (shrink)

An interview with Gail Weiss concerning her interests and influences, especially the body and embodiment.

This study explored perceived benefits and risks of participation in HIV research among 33 female sex workers in Tecún Umán, Guatemala. Stigma associated with sex work and HIV was a critical barrier to research participation. Key benefits of participation included access to HIV/sti prevention and testing, as well as positive and trusting relationships between sex workers and research teams. Control exerted by managers had mixed influences on perceived research risks and benefits. Results underscore the critical need for HIV investigators to (...) develop population-tailored procedures to reduce stigma; engage managers; and reinforce trusting, reciprocal relationships between sex work communities and researchers. (shrink)