Attending--patient contemplation focused on a particular being--is a central ethical activity that has not been recognized by any of the main moral systems in the European philosophical tradition. That tradition has imagined that the moral agent is primarily a problem solver and world changer when what might be needed most is a witness. Moral theory has been agonized by dualism--motivation is analyzed into beliefs and desires, descriptions of facts and dissatisfactions with them, while action is represented as an effort to (...) lessen dissatisfaction by altering the empirical world. In Attending Warren Heiti traces an alternative genealogy of ethics, drawing from the Platonism recovered by Simone Weil and developed in the work of Iris Murdoch, John McDowell, and Jan Zwicky. According to Weil, virtue is knowledge, knowledge is embodied, and the knower is nested in an ecosystem of relationships. Instead of analyzing and solving theoretical problems, Heiti aims to clarify the terrain by setting up objects of attention from more than one discipline, including not only philosophy but also literature, psychology, film, and visual art. The traditional picture captures one important type of ethical activity: faced with a moral problem, one looks to a general rule to furnish the solution. But not all problems conform to this model. Heiti offers an alternative: to see what is needed, one attends to the particular being. (shrink)

The issue of recurrent attenders to eye casualties has received little discussion in the ethics and health policy literature. As many ophthalmology departments offer a walk-in emergency service, protocols need to be in place to ensure appropriate use of this resource and also to identify potential psychiatric comorbidity in such attenders. We illustrate the problem with a recent case.A 42-year-old woman self-presented 14 times over a 4-month period to the same ophthalmic accident and emergency unit. ….

The current practice for UK research ethics committees (RECs) is to invite researchers to attend meetings at which their applications are to be considered and for student-based research the National Research Ethics Service recommends supervisors to attend. This study aims to identify the extent to which students and their supervisors attend NHS REC meetings and whether attendance is associated with the initial outcomes of RECs.

The activities of glancing and attending are rarely compared, yet they have significant affinities to the point where we may say that glancing is a mode of attending while the latter, in turn, often proceeds by glances. This paper explores these affinities, showing that each activity is a form of reactive spontaneity (James) and that each engages in a particular version of advertence. Mental as well as ordinary perceptual glances are examined, with examples being taken from laboratory studies, everyday life, (...) meditation, and the psychotherapeutic technique of focusing. In the end, the two acts collaborate closely, enhance each other, and can be considered conterminous in many of their aims and procedures for reaching them. (shrink)

Attending to the Literary: The Distinctiveness of Literature is a foray into current debates about the nature of the literary. What is literary? Is literarity a thing? Are there still aesthetic standards of taste? Is the category of literary aesthetics an obstacle to understanding the uses of literature? What does it mean to count the reading of literature as an experience in its own right? What would be the deficits to human experience without literature? Attending to the Literary addresses all (...) of these questions with a view to challenging the notion of literarity as merely representative of experience. On the contrary, Alan Singer shows how literarity is an enacting of experience. Through close readings of an eclectic repertoire of literary sentences-culled from the genres of fiction, poetry and drama--Singer demonstrates how syntax stages human capacities for attending ever more consequentially to the world of practical experience. These stagings of forms of attention involve readers in the drama of reason giving and expand the possibilities of rational imagination. Attending to the Literary speaks to a broad audience of readers for whom the question "Why literature matters?" remains an urgent intellectual challenge. (shrink)

Attention is essential to the life of the mind, a central topic in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. Traditional debates in philosophy stand to benefit from greater understanding of the phenomenon, whether on the nature of the self, the foundation of knowledge, the natural basis of consciousness, or the origins of action and responsibility. This book is at the crossroads of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, offering a new theoretical stance on the concept of attention and how it intersects (...) with other functions of the mind, such as perception, consciousness, and action. It presents attention as directed by a subject, essential for perception, but not consciousness or action. By taking seriously the existence of a subject it stands against current trends in philosophy and cognitive science. This book offers an account of the subject and its role in attention that will both help motivate a subject-centered account and avoid some of the common criticisms regarding its existence. It engages with work by many philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, including Block, Campbell, Dickie, Husserl, James, Koch, Mack and Rock, Merleau-Ponty, Treisman, and Wu. (shrink)

Much has been written lately about cases in which blame of the blameworthy is nonetheless inappropriate because of facts about the blamer. Meddlesome and hypocritical cases are standard examples. Perhaps the matter is none of my business or I am guilty of the same sort of offense, so though the target is surely blameworthy, my blame would be objectionable. In this paper, I defend a novel explanation of what goes wrong with such blame, in a way that draws the cases (...) together. In brief, I argue that blaming is essentially an attentive activity, and that, consequently, meddlesome and hypocritical blamers are attending to the wrong things. (shrink)

[P]layers line up in a long line and hold hands. The player at the front of the line is the ‘head’ and the player at the end of the line is the ‘tail’.… The game begins when the head begins to run wildly in any direction, making sharp turns and quick double-backs.… The force created by the twists and turns will often send the tail of the whip flying.… It may be best for the tail to hold on with both (...) hands to keep from flying off the end. Sometimes, however, the tail will go flying no matter how hard they hold on... Be prepared to get dirty if you play this game!--"Crack the Whip: Party Game CentralIf the evolution of American health policy is compared to the children’s game of Crack the Whip, then there is no question that the Medicaid program is the tail of the line. When those at the head of the line start to move. Medicaid receives whatever shocks and unintended consequences result, and when the line “begins to run wildly in any direction,” it receives them faster and harder than the players at the center.Shocks also come from other sources. When the economy slumps, an epidemic arises, or a path in another part of the system becomes a cul-de-sac, new twists and turns occur, with Medicaid absorbing much of the change. (shrink)

In his study “Facial Expression Theory from Romanticism to the Present,” Alan Richardson reminds us that “successful social communication” would be greatly impoverished if “we did not have a reasonably reliable and speedy, and therefore largely unconscious, cognitive mechanism for gauging the emotions and intentions of others through reading their faces.”1 This innately sympathetic capacity for “mind-reading”—that is, for interpreting others’ facial expressions as indicative of internal states of mind—is historically termed “Theory of Mind” (ToM) by cognitive psychologists, philosophers, and (...) primatologists.2Notably, discussion of ToM has mostly revolved around the question of successful or failed empathy, with .. (shrink)

This article explores the discursive construction of a professional flight attendant identity in a corpus of reports written by FAs and voluntarily submitted to a US government agency. The article argues that writing and submission of the reports by FAs can be seen as a performative act, which heightens aviation institutional ideologies whilst foregrounding safety-related practices. Moreover, the narratives make frequent use of the intersubjective relation of adequation and distinction in their situated construction of identity, with FAs excluding pilots from (...) discursive constructions of the inflight crew. This distancing of pilots is counter to the “team” ideology in commercial aviation upon which much flight safety is predicated. (shrink)

This article investigates how auditory attention affects inattentional blindness , a failure of conscious awareness in which an observer does not notice an unexpected event because their attention is engaged elsewhere. Previous research using the attentional blink paradigm has indicated that listening to music can reduce failures of conscious awareness. It was proposed that listening to music would decrease IB by reducing observers’ frequency of task-unrelated thoughts . Observers completed an IB task that varied both visual and auditory demands. Listening (...) to music was associated with significantly lower IB, but only when observers actively attended to the music. Follow-up experiments suggest this was due to the distracting qualities of the audio task. The results also suggest a complex relationship between IB and TUTs: during demanding tasks, as predicted, noticers of the unexpected stimulus reported fewer TUTs than non-noticers. During less demanding tasks, however, noticers reported more TUTs than non-noticers. (shrink)

This paper addresses the so-called paradox of fiction, the problem of explaining how we can have emotional responses towards fiction. I claim that no account has yet provided an adequate explanation of how we can respond with genuine emotions when we know that the objects of our responses are fictional. I argue that we should understand the role played by the imagination in our engagement with fiction as functionally equivalent to that which it plays under the guise of acceptance in (...) practical reasoning, suggesting that the same underlying cognitive-affective mechanisms are involved in both activities. As such, our imaginative engagement with fiction un-problematically arouses emotions, but only to the extent that we are not occurrently attending to our epistemic relation to the fiction i.e. fully attending to the fact that the object of our response is merely fictional. In order to illuminate this idea I examine a recent proposal that the phenomenology of attention is partially non-attributive, and I argue that emotional phenomenology too shares this characteristic. (shrink)

This article argues that the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI) can productively use tragedy as a stimulus. We do this by following Ann Margaret Sharp’s interest in Simone Weil and supplementing it with Iris Murdoch’s writing on art and literature. Weil and Murdoch provide accounts of the moral value of attention that are both timely and enriching for the practice of philosophy for and with young people. This approach hinges on (i) an understanding of the particular affordances of tragedy as (...) attention-based literature and (ii) an attentive approach to stimulus presentation and exploration. Thus, we propose reading tragedies for neither their philosophical nor their cultural authority but rather because of the genre's unique affordances in relation to adolescents. Beginning by tracing Weil’s own educational practises (as a philosophy teacher in schools, and when instructing fellow workers), where she made extensive use of this genre, we move on to a broader exploration of the potential for attention Weil and Murdoch recognised in literature’s stimulation of imaginative exploration. With this in mind, we advocate for the pedagogical use of tragedies as a medium instructive in the limits of individual agency and the richness of reality. For to be moral, for Weil and Murdoch, means to be open to reality, and so to approach other people with attention. In our view, the moral values that inhabit tragedies are best explored through the community of philosophical inquiry, which can facilitate attention to the structure of adolescent experience; in particular, the conditions of adolescents who are in a moment of inheritance of a world beyond their control but in need of their care, experiencing a moment phenomenologically akin to Aristotle’s reversal and recognition. Therefore, tragedies, rather than speaking to us about the ancient past, can, in the CPI, meaningfully orient young people and those who work with them towards their present. (shrink)

Accelerated changes to the planet have created novel spaces to re-imagine the boundaries and foci of environmental health research. Climate change, mass species extinction, ocean acidification, biogeochemical disturbance, and other emergent environmental issues have precipitated new population health perspectives, including, but not limited to, one health, ecohealth, and planetary health. These perspectives, while nuanced, all attempt to reconcile broad global challenges with localized health impacts by attending to the reciprocal relationships between the health of ecosystems, animals, and humans. While such (...) innovation is to be encouraged, we argue that a more comprehensive engagement with the ethics of these emerging fields of inquiry will add value in terms of the significance and impact of associated interventions. In this contribution, we highlight how the concept of spatial and temporal scale can be usefully deployed to shed light on a variety of ethical issues common to emerging environmental health perspectives, and that the potential of scalar analysis implicit to van Potter’s conceptualization of bioethics has yet to be fully appreciated. Specifically, we identify how scale interacts with key ethical issues that require consideration and clarification by one health, ecohealth, and planetary health researchers and practitioners to enhance the effectiveness of research and practice, including justice and governance. (shrink)

The nature of attention has been the topic of a lively research programme in psychology for over a century. But there is widespread agreement that none of the theories on offer manage to fully capture the nature of attention. Recently, philosophers have become interested in the debate again after a prolonged period of neglect. This paper contributes to the project of explaining the nature of attention. It starts off by critically examining Christopher Mole’s prominent “adverbial” account of attention, which traces (...) the failure of extant psychological theories to their assumption that attending is a kind of process. It then defends an alternative, process-based view of the metaphysics of attention, on which attention is understood as an activity and not, as psychologists seem to implicitly assume, an accomplishment. The entrenched distinction between accomplishments and activities is shown to shed new light on the metaphysics of attention. It also provides a novel diagnosis of the empirical state of play. (shrink)

What is subsistence and does it constitute an individual substance which is distinct from its individual nature? Relying upon Thomas, and to a lesser extent, his successors, this dissertation presents a probable solution. This is a thematically organized study, with much textual analysis and a strong attendant interest in the problems of explicating authentically the meaning and systematic coherence of Thomas's doctrine of subsistence. Arguing from authority and reason, this dissertation tries to present the reality and ratio of the supposit (...) and subsistence in three contexts. ;Chapter One examines Thomas's metaphysics of being and how the supposit relates to a being's reality, principles, and modes. The notions of a being , its transcendentals, existence , nature, and substance are examined, and then the supposit and its proper determinations are situated within the context of these constitutive factors and aspects. ;Chapter Two shows how some of these principles are manifested in Thomas's account of the hierarchy of subsistents. Are nature and supposit distinct in certain substances? If distinct, what principles bring about such a distinction? Is esse an act in regard to a supposit or to a nature? What is the act of existence and must it be distinguished from other existential realities? Is a supposit composed of a substantial thing and esse? Or does it compose with esse? ;Chapter Three examines the doctrine of subsistence which arises from Thomas's studies of the Trinity and the Incarnation. In these contexts, the supposit as a subsistent distinct from its individual nature is explicitly presented. By the end of this chapter, the exposition of subsistence according to the mind of Thomas should be more manifest. ;The conclusion presents a summary, recalling the major evidences for the most reasonable and authentically Thomist notion of subsistence: a substantial term. (shrink)

While much has been written on Latour’s politics and use of militaristic language, by attending to some of Latour’s lesser known or read writings, his political location within the traditional Left-Right spectrum becomes more discernable, as does the reason for his frequent resort to the language of war. This article does not seek to defend Latour’s politics or rhetoric, but to provide a corrective by incorporating, rather than taking distance from, his use of militaristic language. Doing so reveals an understanding (...) of Latour’s project as having always been—if not traditionally Left—charting a different Leftist approach. (shrink)

El concepto de postfotografía es uno de los más fértiles que ha dado la estética contemporánea. En el presente artículo pretendemos estudiar la posible participación de las poblaciones migrantes en la condición postfotográfica. Igualmente, comentaremos desde la teoría de la postfotografía tres imágenes y obras audiovisuales ligadas a la migración en el siglo XXI. A través de ellas, se mostrará la posible aplicación del concepto de postfotografía a obras relacionadas con la migración. Asimismo, a partir de ellas creemos poder localizar (...) algunos límites a lo postfotográfico y a su potencialidad política. (shrink)

Race and racism are matters of urgent concern for the international nursing community. Recent global events have presented the discipline with an opportunity to generate and sustain long overdue discussions. However, with this opportunity comes a need to consciously attend to what we mean by race and racism, especially in the context of the nursing literature. Indeed, the development of antiracism depends on how we conceptualise race and racism; it is these conceptualisations that actively shape the scope and priorities of (...) antiracist organising and action. The aim of this critical interpretative synthesis (CIS) is to examine conceptualisations of race and racism in the nursing literature by drawing on contemporary race scholarship. The synthesis of diverse literature is enabled through the explorative and expansive process of the CIS method. This review generates three synthesising arguments—a problem ‘of’ not ‘for’; conceptual inconsistencies and drift; and reliance on the lens of experience—that both critique and contribute to the nursing literature. In the pursuit of antiracism, this article urges us to pay close attention to our conceptualisations of race and racism by illuminating the pitfalls that occur when our conceptualisations are inconsistent, contradictory, or simply neglected. (shrink)

Val Plumwood urged us to attend to earth others in non-dualistic ways. In this essay I suggest that such attention be promoted through what I call "engaged empathy." Engaged empathy involves critical attention to the conditions that undermine the well being or flourishing of those to whom empathy is directed and this requires moral agents to attend to things they might not have otherwise. Engaged empathy requires gaining wisdom and perspective and, importantly, motivates the empathizer to act ethically.