After a year at Brandeis I was hired by MIT, and then I realized for the first time that there was a struggle and that I was on the losing end of it. The people there, particularly Judith Thomson, who is still at MIT, called Continental philosophy “stone-age philosophy,” and wouldn’t let me teach in the graduate program at all, because they thought that it would just corrupt the students and waste their time. I did feel a little unhappy because (...) I wasn’t allowed to teach graduate students, but not very, because I had never taught graduate students, so I didn’t think I had to, and I was still feeling grateful that I could teach philosophy anywhere at all. And I had Todes to talk to, and he was writing his brilliant thesis. (shrink)

This is an expanded version of an interview with Nigel Laurie, based on his contribution to the 11th Annual Australasian Business Ethics Network (ABEN) Conference, held on 8 December 2021. The conference theme Calculative silences and the agency of business ethics scholars is the focus of this interview. After studying philosophy at Glasgow and Guelph in Canada and a career in IBM, Nigel Laurie established his own management consultancy and went on to found the Philosophy of Management journal (...) in 2001. He edited it for its first 8 years and led the early international Philosophy of Management conferences at St Anne’s College, Oxford. In this interview Nigel reflects on his experiences as a consultant in government, the public, private and third sectors across the world and as a visiting academic and offers insights on leadership, agency, analogies, silences and voices for ethics education and practice. (shrink)

BackgroundDefensive practice occurs when physicians provide services, such as tests, treatments and referrals, mainly to reduce their perceived legal or reputational risks, rather than to advance patient care. This behaviour is counter to physicians’ ethical responsibilities, yet is widely reported in surveys of doctors in various countries. There is a lack of qualitative research on the drivers of defensive practice, which is needed to inform strategies to prevent this ethically problematic behaviour.MethodsA qualitative interview study investigated the views and experiences (...) of physicians in Australia on defensive practice and its contribution to low value care. Interviewees were recruited based on interest in medico-legal issues or experience in a health service involved in ‘Choosing Wisely’ initiatives. Semi-structured interviews averaged 60 min in length. Data were coded using the Theoretical Domains Framework, which encapsulates theories of behaviour and behaviour change.ResultsAll participants (n = 17) perceived defensive practice as a problem and a contributor to low value care. Behavioural drivers of defensive practice spanned seven domains in the TDF: knowledge, focused on inadequate knowledge of the law and the risks of low value care; skills, emphasising patient communication and clinical decision-making skills; professional role and identity, particularly clinicians’ perception of patient expectations and concern for their professional reputation; beliefs about consequences, especially perceptions of the beneficial and harmful consequences of defensive practice; environmental context and resources, including processes for handling patient complaints; social influences, focused on group norms that encourage or discourage defensive behaviour; and emotions, especially fear of missing a diagnosis. Overall, defensive practice is motivated by physicians’ desire to avoid criticism or scrutiny from a range of sources, and censure from their professional peers can be a more potent driver than perceived legal consequences.ConclusionsThe findings call for strengthening knowledge and skills, for example, to improve clinicians’ understanding of the law and their awareness of the risks of low value care and using effective communication strategies with patients. Importantly, supportive cultures of practice and organisational environments are needed to create conditions in which clinicians feel confident in avoiding defensive practice and other forms of low value care. (shrink)

This article summarily presents the explicitation interview with some examples of interviews. In the first part, referring to three excerpts from protocols, we consider some of the techniques used to guide a subject into an introspective posture. We show how these techniques create conditions conducive to access to pre-reflective knowledge, knowledge stemming from a moment of action experienced by the subject, of which the subject has no knowledge in the mode of reflective consciousness. Some of this knowledge is in (...) fact surprising both for the interviewer and for the interviewee. The experience or the expertise of the subject interviewed is invariably increased as a result. In the second part, we provide a brief insight into the fields of application of the explicitation interview, with reference to three case studies, which are presented in a vivid and detailed way . We conclude with a very brief panorama of the various known fields of application of the explicitation interview. (shrink)

In its most radical version, Neurophenomenology asks researchers to suspend the quest of an objective solution to the problem of the origin of subjectivity, and clarify instead how objectification can be obtained out of the coordination of subjective experiences. It therefore invites researchers to develop their inquiry about subjective experience with the same determination as their objective inquiry. However, accessing lived experience raises the question of the investigation method, and of the reliability of its results. Here, we present an accurate (...) method of exploration of lived experience: the elicitation (or microphenomenological) interview. In the course of this interview, one first triggers a form of “phenomenological reduction”, then assists the subject in retrieving or “evoking” past experiences, and finally helps the subject to perform acts of attention about this evoked experience, to describe it faithfully. It is shown that this method addresses a set of traditional objections against introspection. (shrink)

Based on conversation analysis, this study investigates central practices in what is defined as a caring interview, in the context of welfare administration. Caring refers to a helpful interviewing in reformulations of questions, taking interviewees’ difficulties to answer into consideration; a caring attitude in the framing of questions, showing understanding of clients’ circumstances and professional’s enactment of expertise in assessments of clients’ disabilities and care needs. Data include a corpus of 43 recorded interviews in which officials at the Swedish (...) Social Insurance Agency interview clients who have applied for benefits. The study adds to research on interactional sensitivity, polar questions and epistemic stance in institutional interaction. The study shows how the interviewer prioritizes confirming polar questions, takes responsibilities of knowing into account and reduces the epistemic gap to the interviewee in practices of a caring interview. This makes the interviewing markedly different from standardized and bureaucratic interviewing. (shrink)

In this June 2004 interview, Julia Kristeva takes us through her long and extraordinary career as a writer, an intellectual, and an academic. She speaks of her early years as a radical poststructuralist, postmodern feminist, and discusses how her scope has broadened with the addition of psychoanalytical theory and practice. She answers questions about her work on the abject, melancholy, motherhood, and love, and reveals how personal experiences, like the death of her father, have shaped parts of her literary (...) output. (shrink)

Violence against women has been a topic engaging feminist legal scholars for a long time, with a renewed feminist advocacy emerging to highlight sexual violence experienced by women during the armed conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the early 1990s. One of the most important legal developments to emerge from this has been the creation of the office of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences, as part of a series of developments at the (...) UN level that finally accorded explicit recognition to violence against women as a human rights concern. In May 2015, Dr. Daniela Nadj interviewed UN Special Rapporteur, Professor Rashida Manjoo, during her visit to give the annual lecture at the Criminal Justice Centre, Queen Mary, University of London. The interview, an edited version of which is presented here, addressed broad themes including the meaning of liberation for women, especially in a post-conflict setting, the pervasive socio-economic inequality faced by women as an enduring obstacle to equality around the world, the normativity gap on violence against women, academic activism, and the politics of legal information. (shrink)

BackgroundContradictory evidence exists about the emotional burden of participating in qualitative research for palliative care patients and carers and this raises questions about whether this type of research is ethically justified in a vulnerable population. This study aimed to investigate palliative care patients' and carers' perceptions of the benefits and problems associated with open interviews and to understand what causes distress and what is helpful about participation in a research interview.MethodsA descriptive qualitative study. The data were collected in the (...) context of two studies exploring the experiences of care of palliative care patients and carers. The interviews ended with questions about patients' and carers' thoughts on participating in the studies and whether this had been a distressing or helpful event. We used a qualitative descriptive analysis strategy generated from the interviews and the observational and interactional data obtained in the course of the study.ResultsThe interviews were considered helpful: sharing problems was therapeutic and being able to contribute to research was empowering. However, thinking about the future was reported to be the most challenging. Consent forms were sometimes read with apprehension and being physically unable to sign was experienced as upsetting. Interviewing patients and carers separately was sometimes difficult and not always possible.ConclusionThe open interview enables the perspectives of patients and carers to be heard, unfettered from the structure of closed questions. It also enables those patients or carers to take part who would be unable to participate in other study designs. The context is at least as important as the format of the research interview taking into account the relational circumstances with carers and appropriate ways of obtaining informed consent. Retrospective consent could be a solution to enhancing participants control over the interview. (shrink)

Following the Body & Society special issue, Skin Matters: Thinking Through the Body’s Surfaces (vol. 24, 1–2), Tomoko Tamari conducted an interview with the special issue editor, Marc Lafrance. He argues for the skin as an interface, which both resists and reinforces binary oppositions. Lafrance is particularly interested in the relationship between the skin and subjectivity, focusing on those who are suffering from traumatic stigmatizing experiences. This theme is also elaborated in the debates around the issue of human-made skin (...) in ‘regenerative medicine’. He argues that while the development of medical technology for human-made organic skin tends often to be welcomed, the actual experience of face-transfer patients following skin graft surgeries is one of physical and psychological hardship along with a complex sense of self-wholeness and ‘reflexive embodiment’. Reflexivity is also an important phenomenon encouraged by the media and social media, which constantly feature representations of the skin. (shrink)

This article is the text of an interview with D. H. Mellor conducted in Cambridge on 30 May 2001 by Anna-Sofia Maurin and Johannes Persson for the philosophical journal Theoria.

Mitchell: Could we begin by discussing the problem of public art? When we spoke a few weeks ago, you expressed some uneasiness with the notion of public art, and I wonder if you could expand on that a bit.Kruger: Well, you yourself lodged it as the “problem” of public art and I don’t really find it problematic inasmuch as I really don’t give it very much thought. I think on a broader level I could say that my “problem” is with (...) categorization and naming: how does one constitute art and how does one constitute a public? Sometimes I think that if architecture is a slab of meat, then so-called public art is a piece of garnish laying next to it. It has a kind of decorative function. Now I’m not saying that it always has to be that way—at all—and I think perhaps that many of my colleagues are working to change that now. But all too often, it seems the case.Mitchell: Do you think of your own art, insofar as it’s engaged with the commercial public sphere—that is, with advertising, publicity, mass media, and other technologies for influencing a consumer public—that it is automatically a form of public art? Or does it stand in opposition to public art?Kruger: I have a question for you: what is a public sphere which is an uncommercial public sphere? Barbara Kruger is an artist who works with words and pictures. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Professor of English and art at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

This article presents an interview method which enables us to bring a person, who may not even have been trained, to become aware of his or her subjective experience, and describe it with great precision. It is focused on the difficulties of becoming aware of one’s subjective experience and describing it, and on the processes used by this interview technique to overcome each of these difficulties. The article ends with a discussion of the criteria governing the validity of (...) the descriptions obtained, and then with a brief review of the functions of these descriptions. (shrink)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) recently hosted the blockbuster exhibition, Africa & Byzantium, which ran from November 19, 2023, to March 3, 2024. This long-anticipated show and accompanying catalogue1 represent one of the first major exhibitions to place the contemporaneous arts of Byzantine, Coptic, Nubian, Ethiopian, and Islamic traditions in Africa side by side. Showcasing medieval Africa’s rich cultural heritage, complexity, power, and transcontinental influence, Africa & Byzantium will become a standard resource for scholars reevaluating Africa’s role in medieval (...) art and culture. Head curator of the exhibition, Dr. Andrea Myers Achi, has kindly agreed to an interview as a supplement to the current Convivium issue on The Arts of Medieval Northern Africa. Dr. Achi is Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art at the Met. She specializes in Late Antique and Byzantine art and archaeology in Northern Africa, particularly in Egypt. She previously worked on the Met’s exhibitions for Art and Peoples of the Kharga Oasis (October 11, 2017 – April 11, 2021), Crossroads: Power and Piety (March 6, 2020 – July 24, 2022), The Good Life: Collecting Late Antique Art at The Met (May 24, 2021 – January 7, 2024), and Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt (2024), which recently opened and will be on display through January 25, 2026. (shrink)

A unique selection of the most significant interviews given by Hannah Arendt, including the last she gave before her death in 1975. Some are published here in English for the first time. Arendt was one of the most important thinkers of her time, famous for her idea of "the banality of evil" which continues to provoke debate. This collection provides new and startling insight into Arendt's thoughts about Watergate and the nature of American politics, about totalitarianism and history, and her (...) own experiences as an emigre. Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations is an extraordinary portrait of one of the twentieth century's boldest and most original thinkers. As well as Arendt's last interview with French journalist Roger Errera, the volume features an important interview from the early 60s with German journalist Gunter Gaus, in which the two discuss Arendt's childhood and her escape from Europe, and a conversation with acclaimed historian of the Nazi period, Joachim Fest, as well as other exchanges. These interviews show Arendt in vigorous intellectual form, taking up the issues of her day with energy and wit. She offers comments on the nature of American politics, on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, on Israel; remembers her youth and her early experience of anti-Semitism, and then the swift rise of the Hitler; debates questions of state power and discusses her own processes of thinking and writing. Hers is an intelligence that never rests, that demands always of her interlocutors, and her readers, that they think critically. As she puts it in her last interview, just six months before her death at the age of 69, "there are no dangerous thoughts, for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Postmodernism:A Self-InterviewIhab HassanThe following interview did not take place in Ihab Hassan's study in Milwaukee, with a view of Lake Michigan, rippling turquoise, blue, and mauve under a sky of fluffy paratactical clouds.Interviewer: You are sometimes known as the Father...Hassan: Please! At most, the Godfather of Postmodernism, though I don't know who the Godmother is. Maybe Madam Hype?I: Why hype?H: Because postmodernism began as a genuinely contested idea (...) and is fading as a form of media hype.I: Can you define it, however tentatively?H: I would prefer not to. In fact, I cannot, no more than I can define romanticism or modernism in a sentence or paragraph. Such definitions are best left to some onomastic genius. Once, I offered a table of features contrasting modernism with postmodernism. Once is quite enough.I: Why is that?H: Because it was as widely cited as pounced upon, nearly everyone ignoring my pointed disclaimer: "Yet the dichotomies this table represents remain insecure, equivocal. For differences shift, defer, even collapse; concepts in any one vertical column are not all equivalent; and inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and postmodernism, abound."I: Well, if we can't define postmodernism, how can we talk about it? [End Page 223]H: The way we talk about everything else: say, freedom, justice, love, spirit, happiness.... We talk about postmodernism by using the word in various verbal contexts—Wittgenstein would have said "language games"—and seeing what happens.I: What happens?H: Some discussions engage postmodernism and clarify it in certain perspectives, without actually defining it: for instance, the works of Hans Bertens, Charles Jencks, Andreas Huyssen, even Fredric Jameson....I: Why even Jameson?H: Because Marxism has a tenuous relation to contemporary reality, as everyone knows except some Western academics.I: Some would say that the entire phenomenon of postmodernism is an exercise of Western academics.H: That's a bit of a non sequitur but true enough, true up to a point. Remember, the phenomenon has overflowed its theoretical origins to become a kind of ironic cultural awareness, a mode of historical reflexivity—if you wish, a perpetually anxious exercise in self-definition.I: But Western, always Western, right?H: Japan has contributed vigorously to postmodernism, especially in art and architecture. So, instead of saying "Western," let's say high-tech, mass-media, omni-consuming societies.I: That, in effect, excludes four fifths of the world, wouldn't you say?H: Yes—and no. You see, cultural postmodernism has mutated into geopolitical postmodernity. By the latter, I mean both globalization with its thousand faces (multinational capitalism, cyber technology, cultural imperialism, "Americanization"), and counter-globalization with as many masks (local knowledge, old cultural traditions, postcolonial ideologies, anti-Western resentments). It's the monster phenomenon of our time.As I have written a good deal about this phenomenon, most recently in Angelika, I won't repeat myself here. The point, however, is that postmodernity is a planetary process, postmodernism is not.I: That suggests a political dimension, which some say you have slighted in your work. How would you respond to that criticism?H: Writing in the late sixties and early seventies about postmodernism, I lacked the benefits of hindsight. For instance, I focused on high culture, Beckett and Borges and Nabokov and Barthelme and Barth. I did not foresee then that postmodernism would become a media phenomenon, involving pop and kitsch. And I recognized the emergent process of globalization only in the Seventies, in Paracriticisms (1975).But I "slighted" the political only in the sense that I did not give it [End Page 224] priority, did not make it an "absolute horizon." In fact, I believe that a primary emphasis on politics flattens, impoverishes our lives. The current paradigm in the humanities ignores the inner cost of "politics."I: Forgive me, but that's another example of what some colleagues in the profession perceive as your contrary or cross-grained character. Can you explain why politics impoverishes our lives?H: Conformists—remember Harold Rosenberg's quip about "the herd of independent minds"?—are quick to discover perversity everywhere. But never mind that. The gravamen is that politics... (shrink)

The following interview retraces the intellectual development of a leading contemporary thinker, from his early student years to his most recent interventions as a political philosopher, and includes a discussion of some of his most well-known and influential theoretical contributions, such as the notion of “weak thought” and his reflections on postmodernism. Gianni Vattimo presents his philosophy to the reader as an “ontology of actuality” which can only properly be understood in the light of the author’s Christian background and (...) his unwavering interest in social and political questions. (shrink)

Upshot: The micro-phenomenological interview is a methodology that enables us to accurately guide subjects in describing an emotional experience. With this guide, it is possible to know the structure of a particular experience, which is helpful to understand the different processes related to it. The incorporation of the micro-phenomenological interview into emotion research can extend the limits set until now by third-person methodologies and give an integral comprehension of emotions.

This text was first published in Theory, Culture & Society, May 13, 2015. For a special issue of Body & Society on ‘Rhythm, Movement, Embodiment', Paola Crespi presents two previously untranslated texts, Rudolf Bode's ‘Rhythm and its Importance for Education' and Rudolf Laban's ‘Eurhythmy and Kakorhythmy'. In the following interview she uncovers further unpublished and untranslated sources and she discusses some of the main themes of these texts in relation to the more widely known text - Danse, théâtre et (...) spectacle vivant – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

MARGARET LYNN SCHABAS (Toronto, 1954) is professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and served as the head of the Philosophy Department from 2004-2009. She has held professoriate positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at York University, and has also taught as a visiting professor at Michigan State University, University of Colorado-Boulder, Harvard, CalTech, the Sorbonne, and the École Normale de Cachan. As the recipient of several fellowships, she has enjoyed visiting terms at Stanford, Duke, (...) MIT, Cambridge, the LSE, and the MPI-Berlin. In addition to her doctorate in the history and philosophy of science and technology (Toronto 1983), she holds a bachelor of science in music (oboe) and the philosophy of science (Indiana 1976), a master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science (Indiana 1977), and a master’s degree in economics (Michigan1985). -/- She has published four books and over forty articles or book chapters in science studies. Some of the journals in which her articles can be found are Isis, Monist, History of Political Economy, Public Affairs Quarterly, Daedaelus, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. Her first book, A world ruled by number (1990) examines the emergence of mathematical economics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her second book, The natural origins of economics (2005), traces the transformation of economics from a natural to a social science. She also has two co-edited collections, Oeconomies in the age of Newton (2003), with Neil De Marchi, and David Hume’s political economy (2008), with Carl Wennerlind. She is currently writing a monograph on Hume’s economics, as well as articles on the history and philosophy of bioeconomics. She is currently president of the History of Economics Society. -/- EJPE interviewed Margaret Schabas at the University of British Columbia in March 2013. In this interview, she recounts her earliest foray into the history and philosophy of economics, the conceptual trade between economics and natural science, and her most recent undertaking: the history and philosophy of bioeconomics. (shrink)

Doctoral students in clinical, counseling, and school psychology programs often collaborate with faculty on research projects in their training as scientist-practitioners. Yet, the determination of publications' credit and order of authorship on resulting manuscripts continues to be a major concern and challenging process for professional psychologists and student collaborators. This article describes the use of case-based learning and semi-structured interview approaches to instruct first-year clinical psychology doctoral students in publication ethics during a research seminar. The instructor models ethical decision-making (...) with 1) a discussion of four cases from his own professional experiences and 2) a description of the Authorship Eligibility Assessment form, which he developed for use with junior researchers. The authors advocate for more educational strategies to supplement the APA standards in teaching the ethics of the publication process. Implications in terms of graduate student development and research collaborations in the field of professional psychology were discussed. (shrink)

Max Velmans, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, is one of the leading theorists of consciousness studies — an interdisciplinary field of study that deals with questions about the nature of consciousness and how it relates to the physical world. In this interview, we look back at his life and work; in particular, his idea of reflexive monism, which is one of his landmark contributions to the field.

Sociologists who use in-depth interview methods have become sensitized to the ways that race-ethnicity and class can form barriers to rapport with respondents, but the question of gender has been largely unexamined. This article compares data from two independently conducted in-depth interview studies of male nurses: one by a female researcher and one by a male researcher. Observed differences in how the men in the samples framed their responses to questions in the two studies are discussed. It is (...) argued that in-depth interviewers can and should become sensitized to respondents' negotiation of the gendered context of the interaction, but the existing proscriptions against cross-gender research are challenged. (shrink)