As a result of the coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic, health professionals are faced with situations they have not previously encountered and are being forced to make difficult ethical decisions. As the first group to experience challenges of caring for patients with coronavirus, Chinese nurses endure heartbreak and face stressful moral dilemmas. In this opinion piece, we examine three related critical questions: Whether society has the right to require health professionals to risk their lives caring for patients; whether health professionals have the (...) right to refuse to care for patients during the coronavirus pandemic; and what obligations there are to protect health professionals? Value of care, community expectations, legal obligations, professional and codes of practice may compel health professionals to put themselves at risks in emergency situations. The bioethical principles of autonomy, justice, beneficence and non‐maleficence, as well as public health ethics, guide nurses to justify their decisions as to whether they are entitled to refuse to treat COVID‐19 patients during the pandemic. We hope that the open discussion would support the international society in addressing similar ethical challenges in their respective situations during this public health crisis. (shrink)

Background Nurses experience moral distress when they cannot do what they believe is right or when they must do what they believe is wrong. Given the limited mechanisms for managing ethical issues for nurses in Japan, an Online Ethics Consultation on mental health (OEC) was established open to anyone seeking anonymous consultation on mental health practice. Research objective To report the establishment of the Online Ethics Consultation and describe and evaluate its effectiveness. Ethical considerations The research was conducted in accordance (...) with the Declaration of Helsinki. Research design This evaluation describes the outcomes of 5 years of operation of the Online Ethics Consultation on mental health in Japan Participants The Online Ethics Consultation received 12 emails requesting consultation. Consultees included mental health nurses, psychiatrists, and service users. Findings The most common questions directed to the service were about seclusion and physical restraint. Response time from receipt of email to sending a reply was between 1 and 14 days. Despite the disappointing number of consultations, feedback has been positive. Discussion The Online Ethics Consultation was established to assist morally sensitive nurses in resolving their ethical problems through provision of unbiased and encouraging advice. Mental health care in Japan has been less than ideal: long-term social hospitalization, seclusion, and restraint are common practices that often lead to moral distress in nurses and the questions received reflected this. The head of the Online Ethics Consultation sent a supportive, facilitative response summarizing the opinions of several consultants. Conclusion This study provides key information for the establishment of an online ethics resource the adoption of which has the potential to improve the experience of nurses, allied health and clients of mental health services. This paper has implications for services concerned with improving patient care, managing nurses’ moral distress, building ethics into decision-making. (shrink)

_A critical introduction to Hegel's metaphysics and philosophy of nature._.

This collection reflects the extraordinary career of the man it honors in its variety of subjects and range of scholarship. Mortimer Adler proposes six amendments to the Constitution. Paul Eidelberg surveys the rise of secularism from Socrates to Machiavelli. Hellmut Fritzsche, a physicist, catalogs some famous scientific mistakes. David Grene (Anastaplo's dissertation advisor) looks at Shakespeare's Measure for Measure as "mythological history." Harry V. Jaffa continues a running debate with Anastaplo on how to read the Constitution, James Lehrberger examines Aquinas's (...) views on natural law, Harry Newman argues "The Case Against Politics." Studs Terkel interviews Anastaplo on his encounter with the Illinois bar, and John Van Doren and others contribute a selection of poems. George Anastaplo turned to an academic career when he was denied admission to the bar in 1950 because, on principle, he affirmed the right of revolution and refused to say whether he was a Communist. In this age of academic specialization, Anastaplo's career has been distinguished by a remarkable versatility of thought. Author of five books, including The Artist as Thinker: From Shakespeare to Joyce (Swallow Press, 1983), Human Being and Citizen: Essays on Virtue, Freedom and the Common Good (Swallow Press, 1986), The Constitution of 1787: A Commentary (1989), and The American Moralist: On Law, Ethics, and Government (Ohio University Press, 1992), Anastaplo has also, for the past three decades, produced a steady stream of essays, articles, and papers on subjects from baseball to the Koran, from Socrates to Freud. Volume 2 of Law and Philosophy includes a complete bibliography of his works. (shrink)

Theodicy: God or evil?: Irenaeus -- Augustine -- Thomas Aquinas -- John Hick -- Alvin Plantinga -- God and evil: Friedrich Nietzsche -- Richard Dawkins -- Divine hiddenness -- Rudolf Otto -- The Kabbalah -- Karl Barth -- Karl Rahner -- Empirical science -- A cultural, historical and literary survey: Does the devil exist? A persistent belief -- Stepping stones to Europe -- Demonology in medieval literary culture -- The Reformation: Two magisterial reformers: Martin Luther -- John Calvin -- De-sacralisation (...) -- The Catholic reform: Three outstanding reformers and conflict with the devil: Saint Ignatius Loyola -- Saint Teresa of Avila -- Saint John of the Cross -- The devil in the era of modernity: Poetry and literature in a new age -- Twentieth-century chronicles of evil -- Exorcism: A historical and theological analysis: Exorcism: The historical context -- Towards a theological assessment of exorcism -- Appendix: Towards a psychological analysis of possession and exorcism. (shrink)

We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer’s recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence. Textual economy leads to efficient descriptions because the material that supports such inferences has been included to satisfy independent communicative goals, and is therefore overloaded in the sense of Pollack [18]. We argue that achieving textual economy imposes strong requirements on the representation and reasoning used (...) in generating sentences. The representation must support the generator’s simultaneous consideration of syntax and semantics. Reasoning must enable the generator to assess quickly and reliably at any stage how the hearer will interpret the current sentence, with its (incomplete) syntax and semantics. We show that these representational and reasoning requirements are met in the SPUD system for sentence planning and realization. (shrink)

The contributions in this volume map out how technologies are used and designed to plan, maintain, govern, demolish, and destroy the city. The chapters demonstrate how urban technologies shape, and are shaped, by fundamental concepts and principles such as citizenship, publicness, democracy, and nature. The many authors herein explore how to think of technologically mediated urban space as part of the human condition. The volume will thus contribute to the much-needed discussion on technology-enabled urban futures from the perspective of the (...) philosophy of technology. This perspective also contributes to the discussion and process of making cities ‘smart’ and just. This collection appeals to students, researchers, and professionals within the fields of philosophy of technology, urban planning, and engineering. (shrink)

This paper develops a general approach to contextual reasoning in natural language processing. Drawing on the view of natural language interpretation as abduction (Hobbs et al., 1993), we propose that interpretation provides an explanation of how an utterance creates a new discourse context in which its interpreted content is both true and promi- nent. Our framework uses dynamic theories of semantics and pragmatics, formal theories of context, and models of attentional state. We describe and illustrate a Prolog implementation.

Resumen: Propongo una lectura de los relatos eróticos de Di Giorgio, según este, el hibridismo genérico textual y sexual ampliamente reconocido por la crítica, así como la recurrencia de transformaciones y metamorfosis a impulsos de un deseo que cancela las fronteras entre lo humano, lo animal, lo vegetal y lo material, realiza una profunda crítica epistemológica a la racionalidad moderna, andro y antropocéntrica, y su forma de concebir identidad y diferencia. El eje de esta ruptura epistemológica es la desarticulación de (...) las estructuras binarias sexo/género y Naturaleza/Cultura, que disloca la alineación de cuerpo-género-deseo y la oposición clásica bios/zoé, bases fundamentales de los órdenes políticos y simbólicos de Occidente.: I propose a reading of Di Giorgio's erotic stories according to which generic textual and sexual hybridism widely recognized by critics, as well as the recurrence of transformations and metamorphosis at the urging of a desire that cancels the boundaries between the human, animal, vegetable and material, he makes a deep epistemological critique of modern rationality, andro and anthropocentric, and his way of conceiving identity and difference. The axis of this epistemological rupture is the disarticulation of the sex/gender and nature/culture binary structures, which dislocate the alignment of body-gender-desire and the classic bios/zoé opposition, fundamental bases of the political and symbolic orders of the West. (shrink)

This article explores the translation and migration of illegal drugs, humanistic therapies and political ideologies by focusing on China’s first residential community drug treatment center, called Sunlight. I argue that the migration of contemporary treatment therapies from one continent to another initiates certain practices that re-appropriate and remake drug-using bodies that live and work at Sunlight. Reviewing Sunlight ethnographically also allows for broader theoretical exploration. When bodies do not operate under the common trope of possessive individualism different forms of biopolitical (...) and therapeutic power are at play. In keeping with the theme of this special issue, this article begins with a discussion of why migration is a useful rubric for understanding how therapeutics and bodies become global entities and practices through the movement of three things: heroin, humanistic therapy and political ideology. It then presents an ethnographic slice of life at Sunlight to demonstrate how these practices and ideologies play out in the everyday. It finally returns to the question of why these therapies re-appropriate the post-socialist drug user’s body and psyche through a discussion of the term ‘psycho-sociability’. Psycho-sociability can be read as a demand for becoming a good biological citizen, as well as a theoretical rubric for explaining non-Western biopolitics. (shrink)

Are emotions, feelings, sentiments not the stuff of literature? There it is where they project their inner logic of aesthetic transmutation; there, beyond the instrument of language that they command. This collection explores how the lyrical virtualities of life-experience and the elegiac style in literature share a common core, lifting the human significance of life from abysmal vitality to esoteric heights, from abysmal grief to a serene reconciliation with destiny. The elegiac sequence in the play of emotions, feelings and sentiments (...) brings together life and literary creativity in its transformatory power. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article posits an interpersonal ethical commitment to combat dangers to democracy in current times. Largely within an American context, two complementary pillars of ethics are presented. The first is from Nel Noddings and the ethics of care and the second developed primarily from Richard Rorty in a neo-pragmatist view. The contexts of present dangers, worldwide, especially in the USA, and then of this nation’s schooling, situate the ethics. A suggestion for teachers, students, and their schools as ‘citizen educators’ to (...) be active in their communities offers one road forward. (shrink)

This article gives a historical-philosophical overview of three generations of pragmatist thinking centered around the question of democracy. It serves as an introduction and contextualization to the papers that develop a third generation pragmatic point of view in the remainder of the special issue. The perspective is from one American-trained philosopher of education who has studied and written widely in pragmatism and European social theory. The article has sections on three generations generally described and with primary influences of John Dewey, (...) Richard Rorty, and Bruno Latour. In each generation, other important philosophic contributions discussed come from C. S. Peirce and William James, Hilary Putnam, Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers as well as relevant commentators. The first two, Dewey and Rorty, contribute to a sub-theme of democracy in their writings that the third, Latour, continues in politics in a section elaboration. The introduction sets forth a generational theme and an international setting for pragmatism. The conclusion summarizes the article's key ideas and points to a need in education for a democratic future. (shrink)

Obsessive–compulsive disorder is a debilitating mental health disorder that can easily become a treatment-resistant condition. Although effective therapies exist, only about half of the patients seem to benefit from them when we consider treatment refusal, dropout rates, and residual symptoms. Thus, providing effective augmentation to standard therapies could improve existing treatments. Group compassion-focused interventions have shown promise for reducing depression, anxiety, and avoidance related to various clinical problems, but this approach has never been evaluated for OCD individuals. However, cultivating compassion (...) for self and others seems crucial for OCD patients, given the accumulating research suggesting that fear of guilt, along with isolation and self-criticism, can strongly contribute to the development and maintenance of OCD. The primary aim of this pilot study was to evaluate the acceptability, tolerability, and effectiveness of an 8-week group compassion-focused intervention for reducing OCD symptoms, depression, fear of guilt and self-criticism, and increasing common humanity and compassionate self-reassuring skills in treatment-resistant OCD patients. Using a multiple baseline experimental design, the intervention was evaluated in a sample of OCD patients who had completed at least 6 months of CBT treatment for OCD, but who continued to suffer from significant symptoms. Participants were randomized to different baseline assessment lengths; they then received 8 weekly, 120-min group sessions of compassion-focused therapy for OCD, and then were tested again at post-treatment and at 1 month follow up. Despite the adverse external circumstances, by the end of treatment, all participants demonstrated reliable decreases in OCD symptoms, and these improvements were maintained at 4-week follow-up for seven of eight participants. The intervention was also associated with improvements in fear of guilt, self-criticism, and self-reassurance, but less consistent improvements in depression and common humanity. Participants reported high levels of acceptability of and satisfaction with the intervention. Results suggest that the intervention may be beneficial as either a stand-alone treatment or as an augmentation to other treatments. (shrink)

Advances in molecular technologies have the potential to help remedy health inequities through earlier detection and prevention; if, however, their delivery and uptake are not more carefully considered, there is a very real risk that existing inequities in access and use will be further exacerbated. We argue this risk relates to the way that information and knowledge about the technology is both acquired and shared, or not, between health practitioners and their patients.A healthcare system can be viewed as a complex (...) social network comprising individuals with different worldviews, hierarchies, professional cultures and subcultures and personal beliefs, both for those giving and receiving care. When healthcare practitioners are not perceived as knowledge equals, they would experience informational prejudices, and the result is that knowledge dissemination across and between them would be impeded. The uptake and delivery of a new technology may be inequitable as a result. Patients would also experience informational prejudice when they are viewed as not being able to understand the information that is presented to them, and information may be withheld.Informational prejudices driven by social relations and structures have thus far been underexplored in considering equitable implementation and uptake of new molecular technologies. Every healthcare interaction represents an opportunity for experiencing informational prejudice, and with it the risk of being inappropriately informed for undertaking such screening or testing. Making knowledge acquisition and information dissemination, and experiences of informational prejudice, explicit through sociologically framed investigations would extend our understandings of equity, and offer ways to affect network relationships and structures that support equity in delivery and uptake. (shrink)

Se reflexiona sobre la posible autoría del documento que se conserva en la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, “_Censura_ sobre los Anales de Tácito…”, ms. 13086. El colector de la miscelánea lo catalogó como anónimo a pesar del nombre que figura en una hoja adjunta al documento: Pedro Ponce de León. En este artículo se plantea una hipótesis sobre su posible autoría: Pedro Ponce de León podría ser el seudónimo con el que ocultó su identidad don Diego de Saavedra Fajardo.

This book provides a reconstructive and critical interpretation of Sartre’s mature dialectical ethics. Taken together, as Sartre intended, the posthumously published key texts demonstrate that the ultimate goal of praxis is “integral humanity” and that “making the human” is always possible because the means to humanity can always be invented.