This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Definitions The Faculty Faculty Leave Nonacademic Staff Tenure and Tenure Track The Student Research Funding.

Research-oriented universities are known for prolific research activity that is often supported by students in faculty-guided research. To maintain ethical standards, universities require on-going training of both faculty and students to ensure Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR). However, previous research has indicated RCR-based training is insufficient to address the ethical dilemmas that are prevalent within academic settings: navigating issues of authorship, modeling relationships between faculty and students, minimization of risk, and adequate informed consent. U.S. universities must explore ways to (...) identify and improve RCR concerns for current (faculty) and future researchers (students). This article reports the findings of a self-study (_N_ = 50) of research stakeholders (students and faculty) at a top tier research institution. First, we report on their perceived importance of applying RCR principles. Second, we explore relationships between stakeholder backgrounds (e.g., prior training, field, and position) and how they ranked the degree of ethical concerns in fictitious vignettes that presented different unethical issues university students could encounter when conducting research. Vignette rankings suggested concerns of inappropriate relationships, predatory authorship and IRB violations which were judged as most unethical, which was dissimilar to what sampled researchers reported in practice as the most important RCR elements to understand and adhere to for successful research. Regression models indicated there was no significant relationship between individuals’ vignette ethics scores and backgrounds, affirming previous literature suggesting that training can be ineffectual in shifting researcher judgments of ethical dilemmas. Recommendations for training are discussed. (shrink)

On one standard reading, Plato's works contain at least two distinct views about the structure of the human soul. According to the first, there is a crucial unity to human psychology: there is a dominant faculty that is capable of controlling attention and behaviour in a way that not only produces right action, but also ‘silences’ inclinations to the contrary—at least in idealized circumstances. According to the second, the human soul contains multiple autonomous parts, and although one of them, reason, (...) normatively dominates the others, it may fail to do so descriptively: even in the face of full, explicit, well‐reasoned, conscious awareness of the truth of a claim, a person may continue to feel residual inclinations towards disavowed, inappropriate and misguided experiences and courses of action. In this paper, I will argue that even the second of these views does not fully capture the ways in which reflective commitment fails to guide human action. Whereas the traditional multi‐part soul view is well suited to explaining phenomena that involve a cognitive conflict between our reflective attitudes and our non‐reflective endorsements, it falls short when we turn to the full array of human patterns of response, because it neglects a further source of challenge to reason's rule, namely, the mediation of associative and heuristic processes. These processes introduce complications for which the simple faculty psychology view cannot adequately account. Because they produce challenges to reason's rule that are phenomenologically invisible, traditional strategies for self‐regulation cannot be straightforwardly applied to their management. (shrink)

W3C: The World Wide Web Consortium. Introduction to HTML: A Self Paced Course on Web Authoring : This is now my favorite online HTML tutorial (which is not to say that I've searched exhaustively, or even extensively). I especially like its Table of HTML (4.01) Character Entities , which gives names and ascii codes for special characters, such as the em-dash, section sign, greek letters, etc. Publishing a Personal Web Page using CU People : Basic information for Cornell people who (...) want to create a personal Web Page. Creating Course Web sites : Cornell faculty wanting to create course websites should look here if they need more space than the 5MB allotted by CU People. Wade's HTML Tutorial : This tutorial makes it easy to get started creating web pages by writing html. Beginner's Guide to HTML : Another good introduction; from the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications). W3C HTML Validator : Check your web pages for errors and compliance with HTML standards. HTML With Style : Biweekly tutorials on making web-pages. Each tutorial contains lots of interesting, opinionated details about the right and wrong way to produce web pages. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

Background: In China, research ethics is a subject of increasingly formal regulation. However, little is known about how nursing researchers understand the concept of research ethics and the ways in which they can maintain ethical standards in their work. Aim: The aim of this study is to examine nursing researchers’ perspectives on research ethics in China. Research design: We conducted a descriptive qualitative study. Qualitative research methods enabled us to gain an in-depth understanding of nursing researchers’ views on research (...) ethics. Participants and research context: We carefully selected and extensively interviewed 28 nursing researchers, nursing faculty, and clinical nurses who had been involved in research or who may undertake research in the future. We collected data between October 2014 and March 2015. Ethical considerations: This study was approved by the institutional review boards of Yale University and Central South University. Findings: We grouped the data into five categories based on the interviewees’ responses: (1) perceptions of ethics, bioethics, and research ethics; (2) perception of the ethics review process; (3) perception of the function of institutional review boards; (4) the need for comprehensive ethical guidelines for future studies; and (5) ethical challenges faced by the interviewees. Discussion and conclusion: This study contributes new insights into nursing researchers’ views on research ethics in China and finds considerable shortcomings in researchers’ understanding and implementation of ethical principles. Intensive educational efforts are needed to provide nursing researchers, institutional review board members, and even study subjects with accurate and up-to-date information and guidance on research ethics. In addition, while Western research ethics theoretically have guided Chinese clinical research for several years, the ways in which nursing researchers have implemented these ethical standards highlight the differences between the Eastern and Western ethical paradigms. This finding suggests the need for ethical standards that are more tailored to the Chinese context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Clear Division of Labor Within Environmental Philosophy?William M. Throop (bio)In discussions about the future of environmental philosophy, I have found myself supporting two positions that are in tension with one another. The first, which has been well explored in the last decade, is that environmental philosophy should have a more dramatic impact outside of academic circles. It should affect policy and guide the behavior of non-philosophers, which usually (...) requires that it deeply engage the empirical details of problems it addresses. The second is that environmental philosophy needs to improve its status within the larger philosophical community, which requires its practitioners to use methods that dominate mainstream philosophy and to be conversant with contemporary work in ethical theory, epistemology, metaphysics, and continental philosophy. Some have argued that this tension places a double burden on those training to be environmental philosophers; they must demonstrate both theoretical and practical excellence. I fear that such a standard will limit [End Page 147] the growth of environmental philosophy. It will be daunting to new environmental philosophers and achieved by only a few.With respect to this tension, I suggest that environmental philosophy should support a robust division of labor. Many new environmental philosophers should be recruited from cohorts trained primarily in core areas of philosophy. Most of these thinkers will probably focus on highly theoretical issues—issues that anyone in the field would recognize as philosophical.Their knowledge of environmental problems may be superficial and their audience likely will consist primarily of other philosophers. Their impact beyond philosophy may be quite limited (except for their students). I come from this tradition, and I am still delighted by the purely intellectual puzzles that our field generates. Work of this sort should be honored, but our field will be sterile if it is dominated by this kind of thought.I hope that many other new environmental philosophers will be trained in interdisciplinary environmental graduate programs or "applied" philosophy Ph.D. programs where they will acquire the interdisciplinary expertise necessary to address practical problems and to effectively engage non-philosophical audiences. This group of "practical" environmental philosophers should also include a host of practitioners in other fields who contribute to philosophical dialogue. I suspect that much work in this area will be case-based, empirically sophisticated and, where it addresses non-philosophical audiences, more reliant on compelling metaphors than on tight arguments. I doubt that it is fruitful to view this group as applying the work of the former group. The aims, the sources of insight and the standards of quality for the two groups are categorically different. For practical philosophers, the political feasibility of a proposal matters, and the arguments must have the capacity to move relevant stakeholders. The results of this work may appear to be philosophy-lite to those in the first group, but only if judged by standards that are inappropriate if we accept a division of labor in the field.This division of labor cannot be an apartheid. Many promising innovations in environmental philosophy will come from the interface between these groups. And unfortunately, a good bit of questionable work done in each group may result from a failure to understand progress that has been made by the other group. For example, philosophers focused only on theory may draw implications for action that fail to accord with current empirical information. Practical philosophers may [End Page 148] critique simplified metaethical positions that have long been abandoned in favor of more sophisticated versions. A healthy dialogue and a mutual respect should diminish these dangers. Such a division of labor has significant implications for graduate education, hiring and evaluation of faculty, and allocation of prestige within the field. The health and growth of environmental philosophy will depend on part on how we address these implications.William M. Throop Bill Throop is provost and professor of philosophy at Green Mountain College, an environmental liberal arts college in Poultney, VT. His background is in epistemology and philosophy of science, but in the last decade his work has focused on conceptual and ethical issues in ecological restoration and wilderness preservation. E-mail: [email protected] © 2007 Indiana University Press... (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

Is it justified to hold that an agent S has a (moral) right to P if the duty-bearer is not specified? There is an intense ongoing debate on this question. There are two positions in the literature. On the one hand, O´Neill´s much-discussed account of rights holds that it is justified to say that an agent S has a right to P if and only if the duty-bearer is sufficiently determined – i.e. if and only if it is clear against (...) whom S may claim her right to P (O’Neill 1986, 1988, 1996, 2000, 2005, 2016). Call this, the ‘claimability condition’. On the other hand, interest-based theorists argue that it can be justified to say that an agent S has a right to P even if the duty-bearer is not sufficiently determined (Caney 2007; Griffin, 2008; Raz 1988; Tasioulas 2007; see also: Etinson, 2013; Ypi 2010). Who (if anyone) is correct in this fundamental discussion about the very nature of rights? In this paper, I provide an answer to this crucial question. Neither O´Neill nor interest-based theorists provide good reasons to justify their positions. However, I argue, the claimability condition is an existence condition of rights justified on the basis of their action-guiding character. The reason is that if the duty-bearer is not specified, the content of the right (its correlative obligation) does not sufficiently guide what the agent should do because it is indeterminate who is required to act (or refrain from acting). (shrink)

El papel de filosofía y humanidades en forjar un “ideal de humanidad” se refiere no sólo a las difíciles relaciones que éstas tradicionalmente han tenido con los poderes mundanos, sino, sobre todo, a su papel protagónico como guías de un ideal de humanidad y valores espirituales en tiempos de crisis. Kant defendió el papel de los ideales racionales de la “facultad de filosofía” a fines del s. XVIII, ante la teología, el derecho y la medicina. La reflexión de Fichte cuando (...) la nación alemana luchaba por su existencia luego de su derrota por los ejércitos napoleónicos a inicios del s. XIX, da un impulso decisivo a los valores del idealismo alemán. Un siglo después, ante la misma nación alemana, nuevamente derrotada en la primera guerra mundial y sin hallar respuestas a su aflicción en las ciencias exactas ni en su cultura determinada por la técnica, Husserl ve en “el ideal de Humanidad de Fichte” la respuesta a aquello que puede darle su ultima satisfacción: la producción teleológica de un mundo humano, en el que pueda realizarse un orden mundial moral, único fin, fundamento y valor absoluto de la humanidad. Hoy nos hallamos en otro momento de peligro: no sólo el del positivismo naturalista desplazando desde el s. XIX a la formación humanística. El mayor de los peligros es ahora la alianza de ese naturalismo con el mundo globalizado del presente, bajo el imperio de la estan-darización burocrática y corporativa al servicio de la producción desenfrenada de dinero.The role of philosophy and the human sciences in forging an “ideal of humanity” concerns not only the tensions that they traditionally have had with worldly powers. It mostly deals with their primal role as guides of an ideal of humanity and spiritual values in times of crisis. Kant defended the central role of the “Faculty of Philosophy”’s rational ideals by the end of the 18th century, as opposed to Theology, Jurisprudence and Medicine. Fichte’s reflection when the German nation was fighting for its survival after its defeat by the Napoleonic armies at the beginning of the 19th century, gives a decisive impulse to the values brandished by German Idealism. A century later, facing the same German nation newly defeated at World War I, and without any answers to its affliction either in exact sciences nor in its culture determined by technology, Husserl finds in “Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity“ the answer to that which can give it its lasting satisfaction: the teleological production of a human world, in which a world moral order may arise, as humanity’s sole goal, foundation, and absolute value. Today we find ourselves in another moment of danger: not only that of a naturalistic positivism displacing a humanistic education. The greatest of all dangers is currently the alliance of this naturalism with the Golden calf installed in the globalized world of today, under the empire of the bureaucratic and corporative standardization at the service of the frenzied production of money. (shrink)

This book is an essential guide for veterinarians, veterinary faculty and policymakers for understanding the core competencies of a fresh veterinarian. The book briefly covers competencies in preclinical, paraclinical, and clinical subjects including anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, veterinary jurisprudence, animal management & welfare including nutrition and breeding, infectious and non-infectious diseases, disease epidemiology, diagnosis, and treatment, prevention, control and zoonoses, surgical and other clinical interventions. The book further includes other competencies, including biologicals, anti-mortem, and post-mortem inspection, certifications, applied one health aspects, (...) review and analysis of scientific evidence, international trade and regulations, and organization of veterinary services. It also highlights the importance of effective communication, interpersonal skills, record keeping and management of a small veterinary hospital, health informatics, etc. The book breakdowns the must-have competencies of a global veterinarian into different topics and subtopics for easy comprehension and further learning. It enables the professional standard-setting & regulatory bodies and academicians in improved curricula designing and implementation and more importantly tries to bring uniformity in day one veterinary graduates’ competencies globally, enhancing the movement and employability of veterinarians across the world. (shrink)

_Thinking Through Questions_ is an accessible and compact guide to the art of questioning, covering both the use and abuse of questions. Animated by wide-ranging and engaging exercises and examples, the book helps students deepen their understanding of how questions work and what questions do, and builds the skills needed to ask better questions. Cowritten by two of today's leading philosopher-teachers, _Thinking Through Questions_ is specifically designed to complement, connect, and motivate today’s standard curricula, especially for classes in critical thinking, (...) philosophical questioning, and creative problem- solving (called here "expansive questioning"). Offering students a wide and appreciative look at questions and questioning, this small book will also appeal to faculty and students across the disciplines: in college writing courses, creativity workshops, education schools, introductions to college thinking, design thinking projects, and humanities and thinking classes. Open-ended, creative, and critically self-possessed thinking is its constant theme—what field doesn’t need more of that? (shrink)

Dear Readers,Welcome to this issue of our beloved Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics! In this sweltering heat we are all seeking for some cool and comfort. We bring this issue of BJB on different ethical practices and bring up related questions. Are we respecting the rights of every human being when we are either doing research or practicing health service provision? What are the minimum norms and standards to be maintained or are we circumventing those? The issue looks into different (...) issues and provides us with indepth information, queries, fears and reservations.In the article on Knowledge, attitude and practice of medical ethics among medical intern students in a Medical College in Kathmandu, Ramesh P Aacharyaand Yagya L Shakya, report on a Knowledge Attitude and Practice survey of 46 medical undergraduate interns of Maharajgunj Medical Campus. The result of the survey is quite interesting. ‘Doctors know the best irrespective of patients’ opinion was agreed upon by 35 %, ‘Confidentiality cannot be kept in modern era and should be abandoned’ was strongly disagreed by 34.8% and disagreed by 60.9%. The Authors hope that the findings will assist the faculties to strengthen the teaching of medical ethics and guiding the interns for ethical professional conduct. In the article titled Organizational Justice and Employee’s Service Behavior in the Healthcare Organizations in Bangladesh is an agenda for Research, Md. Nuruzzaman and Md. Humayun Kabir Talukder present a conceptual framework and a set of hypotheses regarding the relationships among distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, employee’s citizenship behaviour, role prescribed behaviour and counterproductive behavior in the healthcare organizations in Bangladesh. The authors state that the purpose is to assist the policy makers and service providers in identifying desirable and undesirable HRM practices in order to maintain optimum level of employee commitment for ensuring quality and efficient service delivery to the communities. Though the article is theoretical it may be useful for the policy makers and service providers. If an operational research could be carried out to test the hypothesis the practical utility of the concept could be tested in Bangladesh.Zoheb Rafique in the article Ethical Justification of Conducting Research Trials in Lower and Middle Income Countries Including Pakistan: The Responsibilities of Research Enterprises explores the ethical aspects of research sponsored by commercial agencies. He looks into the factors that influence selection of a study site for a sponsored trial particularly in traditional countries like Pakistan where cultural values add to the problem in assuring that research is conducted in an ethical manner. In this paper, the Author discusses the responsibilities of researchers and funders in low and middle income countries like Pakistan and the ethical justifications of doing research trials in developing countries. He concludes that research participants should be fully informed about the research trial and their participation and it is their right to know all risks and benefits so that they have the option of rejecting participation.The article on Ethical aspects of Dhaka University Tele-medicine System by Ahmed Raihan Abir provides and analysis of the tele- medicine system in Dhaka University. The Author is a member of an extended group at Dhaka University (DU) which has been developing telemedicine equipment and data acquisition software to promote telemedicine practice in Bangladesh. Recently the Telemedicine group of DU and a local NGO named SAMAMA with support from Service innovation fund (SIF) of the Prime Minister Office (PMO) of Bangladesh took the initiative to establish eight rural telemedicine centers and one expert center for the field trial of telemedicine in Bangladesh. The aim of this paper is to examine the ethical challenges of such health care system and the effort to overcome these problems before starting the field trial. The author looks into the details of Data confidentiality and security, Responsibilities of Doctor and Rural Technician, Quality of service and Implications of telemedicine in Bangladesh. He concludes that DU telemedicine project will essentially bring the services of qualified medical experts to the doorsteps of the common people throughout the country, even in the remote rural areas. Although a telemedicine cannot match a face to face consultation, DU tele-medicine system is much better than no consultation at all.Sifat Rahman in the article on Ethical Issues of Fair Subject Selection in Research provides an overview of the criterion for maintaining ethical standards for conducting research. The Author reviews the three fundamental conditions to be met for adhering to strict ethical standards which are: Respect for Persons by protecting the autonomy of people, treating them with courtesy and respect and obtaining informed consent.; Beneficence which incorporates the philosophy of "Do no harm" while maximizing benefits for the research project and minimizing risks to the research subjects; and Justice by ensuring that reasonable, non-exploitative, and well-considered procedures are administered fairly. Finally the Author concludes that Researchers must be truthful and conduct no deception.Dear Readers, as you can see from the above ethics and maintaining the values in research and services are of utmost importance in the improvement of the quality of life. Through our queries, questions and sense of respect for every living being can our endeavors to ensure ethics in all spheres of development be successful.Dear Readers, please keep on sending your articles, notes or thoughts to us. Your participation will make a difference in the quality of our lives.Best regardsTahera AhmedEditor. (shrink)

The goal of this book is to help the reader gain knowledge on ethical and legal issues in the field of student affairs and develop competency to follow the profession’s principles and standards of conduct. The significance of the book is due to its focus on the practical value of ethics and legal issues and its aim to address the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required of student affairs educators to develop and maintain integrity in their life and work as (...) described by the ACPA/NASPA. The text offers readers a number of major unique features: It offers multiple ethical decision-making models to guide student affairs educators in their ethical decision-making process. It proposes that ethics is not an individual but an organizational responsibility. It offers that ethical decision making is a professional skill that can be practiced and applied in student affairs educators’ day-to-day practice. It presents the reader with the most current legal issues in student affairs and higher education. Finally, it reflects three themes: integration of ACPA/NASPA competency areas; development of professional identity; and application of knowledge and theory to practice. The book is critical and timely. A book that focuses on ethical and legal issues in student affairs is needed for faculty in preparation programs, new professionals navigating their identity as student affairs educators, and a resource for mid- and senior-level professionals facilitating ongoing professional development. The book begins to address what it means to have a professional identity, which is ground in the shared ethical and legal values espoused within the profession and academia. Each chapter uniquely contributes to the complexity embedded in the study of ethics and how that is applied to practice. Additionally, the volume is a balance of procedural knowledge, case illustrations, and guided practice exercises to facilitate the reader’s ability to translate the theory and research discussed into professional decision making and application. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Memoriam: Bennett ReimerForest HansenIn late afternoon on January 9, 2014, family members, colleagues, former students, and other friends met at Northwestern University to reflect upon and honor the life of Bennett Reimer, who had died from cancer on November 18, 2013 at the age of 81. The printed program fittingly called it a “Memorial Celebration,” because that is what it was. Fine wine and savory hors d’oeuvres were (...) served, a woodwind quartet of Bienen School of Music graduate students played Reimer favorites, and Beth Hebert, Bennett’s life partner of 27 years, greeted every person as they entered the hall. Reimer would have approved of the exuberant tastefulness of the event. He would probably have blushed and demurred, however, when in the formal part of the program his colleagues, daughters, and former students praised him in recalling specific occasions of his mentoring, inspiring, modeling, guiding, collaborating, and originating. (In his writing Reimer loved such extensive discriminatory lists.) Included among the expressions of respect and affection were these words by Estelle Jorgensen, who could not be present, read by Randall Allsup: [End Page 101]We have lost a wonderful person who lived life richly and made an outstanding contribution to the field of music education and beyond. In honor of his work as a philosopher of music education, among the many facets of his professional life, the Philosophy of Music Education Review will have a special issue devoted to the ideas that he left us, contributed by prominent music educational leaders and writers. Such moments of professional loss leave a rent in our midst that can never quite be patched. Along with our sorrow is our memory of the joy, idealism, and hope that characterized his lived life. We cling collectively to the memories of the blessings he brought us in simply being Bennett.Reimer was born on June 19, 1932 in Brooklyn, where he grew up. He earned a B.S. in music education in 1954 at SUNY at Fredonia and an M.S. (1955) and Ed.D. (1963) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His teaching career started at the Richmond Professional Institute of the College of William and Mary (1955–57) and continued at Madison College (Harrisburg VA) (1958–1960) and the University of Illinois (1960–65). At Case Western Reserve University (1965–1978), he became chair of the Music Education Department and holder of the Kulas Endowed Chair in Music. Then at Northwestern University he held the John W. Beattie Chair in Music from 1978 until his retirement in 1997. He chaired the Music Education Department there, directed the doctoral program in music education, and founded and directed the Center for the Study of Education and the Musical Experience—a weekly research forum for graduate students and faculty. Although Reimer had started out as an instructor in clarinet and oboe, musical theory, conducting, and music appreciation, he became a scholar, teacher, and lecturer in the new field of philosophy of music education with a worldwide following and reputation.Reimer was most noted for his seminal A Philosophy of Music Education (1970), which can fittingly be described as the founding document of the discipline. Typically he made revisions for the second edition in 1989 and more radical ones for the third edition in 2003, retitled as A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision. This work has been translated into French, Japanese, and Chinese, and, forthcoming, Greek. He was associated with PMER and the International Society for Philosophy of Music Education (ISPME) from their beginnings in 1990.Besides his seminal works, Reimer wrote or co-wrote another twenty books and more than 150 articles, reviews, and book chapters. A few of his book titles indicate the range of his thought, from his early and widely used textbooks The Experience of Music (1971) for college students and Silver Burdett Music for grades 1–8 to his more recent Performing with Understanding: The Challenge of the National Standards for Musical Education (2000), World Musics and Music [End Page 102] Education: Facing the Issues (2002), and Seeking the Significance of Music Education (2009). He was an active participant and leader in a host of other music... (shrink)

This pamphlet contains essays by Will Herberg, C. Herman Pritchett, David Fellman, Valerie Earle and Sidney Hook on the principle of academic freedom, its implications, and its recognition by the courts. Will Herberg in the opening essay argues that the greatest threat to academic freedom is the politicization of the university, the pressure to convert the university into an agency of social and political action. Unless the university is thoroughly depoliticized and rededicated exclusively to the cause of learning and scholarship, (...) warns Herberg, it will be destroyed. C. H. Pritchett provides a useful summary of nearly all the Supreme Court's decisions bearing in some way on the academic freedom of teachers. Sidney Hook maintains that the Supreme Court has failed to make certain basic distinctions in its opinions, i.e., between the obligations of public employees and employees in private institutions; between those in professions of public trust and those who are not; and between membership in highly disciplined organizations with purposes antithetical to democratic values and membership in others which are broad in purpose and loosely bound together. From an analysis of the opinions of the Supreme Court and the nature and defense of academic freedom, Hook concludes that the court is a very uncertain protector and guide. In matters of professional ethics, it is the faculties themselves which must uphold and enforce standards of professional integrity. Their failure to do so has led to unnecessary and unwise legislative intervention. Recent events on many college and university campuses, and in particular the increasing resort to civil courts to adjudicate what are basically professional disputes, have emphasized the need for the type of discussion contained in this brief volume.--J. P. D. (shrink)

In this issue of JCE, Douglas Diekema argues that the best interest standard (BIS) has been misemployed to serve two materially different functions. On the one hand, clinicians and parents use the BIS to recommend and to make treatment decisions on behalf of children. On the other hand, clinicians and state authorities use the BIS to determine when the government should interfere with parental decision-making authority. Diekema concedes that the BIS is appropriately used to “guide” parents in making medical treatment (...) decisions for their children. But he argues that the BIS is inappropriately used as a “limiting” standard to determine when to override those decisions. Specifically, Diekema contends that the BIS “does not represent the best means for determining when one must turn to the state to limit parental action.” He argues that this limiting function should be served by the harm principle instead of by the BIS.I contend that we should not reassign the BIS’s limiting function to the harm principle. In this article I make two arguments to support my position. First, the BIS has effectively served, and can serve, both guiding and limiting functions. Second, the harm principle would be an inadequate substitute. It cannot serve the limiting function as well as the more robust BIS. (shrink)

The gloriously simple practice of choosing one thing to do, when to do it, and getting it done. Every day, a billion knowledge workers wake up, gravitate towards a pixelated screen and process information for eight hours or more, facing an endless and bewildering array of work and life choices. We're confronted with countless always-on options; untimely, unsolicited notifications; and a constant competition for our attention. This depletes our faculty for choosing the right things to do, leading millions to become (...) perplexed, frazzled, anxious, or depressed. Timeboxing by Marc Zao-Sanders is a comprehensive guide to carefully and intentionally selecting what to do, specifying start and finish times, focusing solely on that single activity, and getting it done to an acceptable standard within that timeframe. This is the fundamental, transcendent time-management practice; countless luminaries, from Carl Jung and Albert Einstein to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, have employed some form of it in their daily lives. Zao-Sanders provides an informative and accessible look at every aspect of this revolutionary method- how to do it consistently, and how to do it well. Timeboxing offers guidance on what you can, should, and will do at any given moment. This pragmatic and life-changing practice of intentional daily activity has been proven to yield what almost every human being wants most: a chosen, cherished life. (shrink)

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library analyzes the intellectual standards by which reasoning is judged by skilled thinkers. It broadens the discussion of essential standards such as clarity, accuracy, relevance, and fairness to encompass banks of standards useful for any teacher, administrator, or professional in an evaluative role.

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing is increasingly popular (Giese, Lee, Melas, Nagy, & Nishikawa 2019), and is now percolating into sustainability textbooks and pedagogy. This is problematic because many faculty teaching sustainability do not have a background in finance, and thus find teaching ESG challenging. This paper develops pedagogical resources to teach the fundamentals of ESG investing, be that in a Foundations of Sustainable Management course or a Business Ethics course. We do this by developing four learning objectives: (1) (...) Understand the ESG basics, including why ESG investing is important to investors and, for faculty, outlining where it might be appropriately placed in an ethics or introduction to sustainability class, (2) Define ESG Investing and discuss how ESG investing strategies differ from regular investment strategies, (3) Identify the primary methods to choose ESG investments, the related ESG rating systems, and the primary proprietary investment options based on these screening rules, and (4) Identify ESG options available to investors that meet their risk preferences. (shrink)

As a supplement to other volumes in the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book provides a framework by which to assess the integration of critical thinking into an educational system The critical thinking competency standards articulated in this guide serve as a resource for teachers, curriculum designers, administrators and accrediting bodies.

In his article, Bester (2018) criticizes the so-called “harm consensus” movement among a growing number of bioethicists and practitioners. He argues that the harm principle is unable to replace the...

Leibniz maintains that even though God’s intellect contains all possibles, some of these possibles are not compossible. This incompossibility of some possibles is supposed to explain which collections of possibles are possible worlds and why God does not actualize the collection of all possibles. In order to fully understand how this works, we need to establish what precisely Leibniz takes to be the source of incompossibility, that is, which divine attribute or faculty gives rise to the incompossibility of certain possibles. (...) Different interpretations answer this question in different ways. This chapter explores the role that God’s faculties play on some of the standard interpretations of Leibniz’s notion of incompossibility and argues that we are faced with a dilemma: even though incompossibility must somehow arise from God’s faculties, none of the faculties usually distinguished seems up to the task. To escape this dilemma, we need to revise the traditional understanding of the divine faculties. More specifically, we need to recognize wisdom as an attribute that is distinct from intellect, power, and will and that is the source of incompossibility. (shrink)

This book focuses on six key practices for engaged learning: acknowledging and building on students' prior knowledge and experiences; facilitating relationships; offering feedback; framing connections to broader contexts; fostering reflection and metacognition; and promoting integration and transfer of knowledge and skills.

The practice of research is full of ethical challenges, many of which might be addressed through the teaching of responsible conduct of research . Although such training is increasingly required, there is no clear consensus about either the goals or content of an RCR curriculum. The present study was designed to assess community standards in three domains of research practice: authorship, collaboration, and data management. A survey, developed through advice from content matter experts, focus groups, and interviews, was distributed (...) in November 2010 to U.S. faculty from 50 graduate programs for each of four different disciplines: microbiology, neuroscience, nursing, and psychology. The survey addressed practices and perceived standards, as well as perceptions about teaching and learning. Over 1,300 responses yielded statistically significant differences in responses to nearly all questions. However the magnitude of these differences was typically small, leaving little reason to argue for community consensus on standards. For nearly all questions asked, the clear finding was that there was nothing approaching consensus. These results may be useful not so much to teach what the standards are, but to increase student awareness of the diversity of those standards in reported practice. (shrink)

This article presents standards for setting up and educating institutional ethics committees (IECs). These standards are based on experiences in the Netherlands, where IECs have been established in a large number of health care institutions. Though the IEC has become a generally accepted institution within Dutch health care, there are concerns over its effectiveness regarding the improving of the moral quality of clinical decision making. Health care practitioners and members of IECs too, experience a gap between the IEC (...) and the reality of the clinical environment. At this moment, there is interest in developing programmes which educate practitioners in moral issues and how to deal with them, using the method of a structured debate on the ward. The IEC will not be made obsolete by this development, but can play a guiding role in the implementation of such programmes. Current concerns are the lack of patient representation in the Dutch IEC, and the loss of contact with the local community of health care practitioners because of the merger of hospitals into bodies similar to UK National Health Service (NHS) trusts. (shrink)

Teaching of responsible conduct of research is largely predicated on the assumption that there are accepted standards of conduct that can be taught. However there is little evidence of consensus in the scientific community about such standards, at least for the practices of authorship, collaboration, and data management. To assess whether such differences in standards are based on disciplinary differences, a survey, described previously, addressing standards, practices, and perceptions about teaching and learning was distributed in November (...) 2010 to US faculty from 50 graduate programs for the biomedical disciplines of microbiology, neuroscience, nursing, and psychology. Despite evidence of statistically significant differences across the four disciplines, actual differences were quite small. Stricter measures of effect size indicated practically significant disciplinary differences for fewer than 10 % of the questions. This suggests that the variation in individual standards of practice within each discipline is at least as great as variation due to differences among disciplines. Therefore, the need for discipline-specific training may not be as important as sometimes thought. (shrink)

This article presents standards for setting up and educating institutional ethics committees (IECs). These standards are based on experiences in the Netherlands, where IECs have been established in a large number of health care institutions. Though the IEC has become a generally accepted institution within Dutch health care, there are concerns over its effectiveness regarding the improving of the moral quality of clinical decision making. Health care practitioners and members of IECs too, experience a gap between the IEC (...) and the reality of the clinical environment. At this moment, there is interest in developing programmes which educate practitioners in moral issues and how to deal with them, using the method of a structured debate on the ward. The IEC will not be made obsolete by this development, but can play a guiding role in the implementation of such programmes. Current concerns are the lack of patient representation in the Dutch IEC, and the loss of contact with the local community of health care practitioners because of the merger of hospitals into bodies similar to UK National Health Service (NHS) trusts. (shrink)

Background:Nurses and nursing students increasingly confront ethical problems in clinical practice. Moral sensitivity, moral reasoning, and ethical decision-making are therefore important skills throughout the nursing profession. Innovative teaching methods as part of the ethics training of nursing students help them acquire these fundamental skills.Aim:This study investigated the effects and potential benefits of using standardized patients in ethics education on nursing baccalaureate students’ moral sensitivity, moral reasoning, and ethical decision-making by comparing this method with in-class case analyses.Research design:This is a quasi-experimental (...) study.Participants and research context:The sample comprised 89 students in Hacettepe University’s Faculty of Nursing. Following lectures describing the theoretical components of ethics, students were randomly assigned to two working groups, one using standardized patients and the other using in-class case analyses. Data were collected using the Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire, Rest’s Defining Issues Test, and the Nursing Dilemma Test. All data were analysed using IBM SPSS Statistics Version 23.Ethical considerations:Ethical approval and official permission were obtained. All participating students completed informed consent forms.Findings:According to the results, the moral sensitivity of students in the standardized patient group significantly improved over time compared to those in the case analysis group, while the mean scores of students in both groups for moral reasoning and ethical decision-making were not statistically significant.Conclusion:Based on our results, we recommend the use of both standardized patients and case analysis as appropriate teaching methods in ethics education. (shrink)

We proposed the Standards of Conducts to provide a general framework that will serve as the basis for guiding each biostatistician and stem cell researcher to formulate their personal standards, rather than as rules with which they are required to comply. Given the responsibility and characteristics of their work, they are expected to maintain independence and work autonomously as professionals. Each of the Standards of Conducts comprises a preamble, mission and values to uphold, Standards of Conducts, (...) and background. When one internalizes “self-formulated” standards, to make excuses for oneself would be akin to a self-betrayal; responsible actions can be anticipated. If one begins and continues to consider “who I am and what do I work for,” this will become their inner energy, and a source of motivation and pride to inspire oneself. In addition, this aspirational style might help citizens to recognize the autonomous stance of the professional body and that they share the same values. (shrink)

Metaphysicians should pay attention to quantum mechanics. Why? Not because it provides definitive answers to many metaphysical questions-the theory itself is remarkably silent on the nature of the physical world, and the various interpretations of the theory on offer present conflicting ontological pictures. Rather, quantum mechanics is essential to the metaphysician because it reshapes standard metaphysical debates and opens up unforeseen new metaphysical possibilities. Even if quantum mechanics provides few clear answers, there are good reasons to think that any adequate (...) understanding of the quantum world will result in a radical reshaping of our classical world-view in some way or other. Whatever the world is like at the atomic scale, it is almost certainly not the swarm of particles pushed around by forces that is often presupposed. This book guides readers through the theory of quantum mechanics and its implications for metaphysics in a clear and accessible way. The theory and its various interpretations are presented with a minimum of technicality. The consequences of these interpretations for metaphysical debates concerning realism, indeterminacy, causation, determinism, holism, and individuality are explored in detail, stressing the novel form that the debates take given the empirical facts in the quantum domain. While quantum mechanics may not deliver unconditional pronouncements on these issues, the range of possibilities consistent with our knowledge of the empirical world is relatively small-and each possibility is metaphysically revisionary in some way. This book will appeal to researchers, students, and anybody else interested in how science informs our world-view. (shrink)

The problem of agential guidance consists in explaining the possibility of guiding an action in purely reductive causal terms. After examining Harry Frankfurt’s articulation of this problem, the standard systemic reductive causal answer is explored and found wanting. Two general explanatory challenges are singled out as decisive in assessing the viability of a causal answer to the problem of agential guidance: first, the correct identification of the actual sources of action guidance in the form of guiding intentions, and, second, the (...) recognition of the limitations of a content-based strategy to identify an action under guidance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guided Rapid Unconscious Reconfiguration in Poetry and ArtRoger SeamonThe idea that literary works are designed to give pleasure does not get much exercise these days. So I would like to take it out for a walk. We’ll see where it takes us, how much ground it covers, and what friends it makes along the way. Perhaps if we take it off the leash of theory, it will roam far (...) enough afield.... By this time you are bored with my metaphor, and thus have made a judgment about the use of a trope that is often said to be at the heart of poetry. 1 What I want to do is give an account of the principle that led to that judgment, for it is the same principle, I shall argue, that governs judgments about the aesthetic dimension of literary works.I first encountered the idea in F. W. Bateson’s English Poetry: An Introduction, where he labels it the “The Principle of the Semantic Gap.” Poetry, Bateson says, does not consist of the transference of feeling from poet to reader (the Romantic and expressive view which he opposes), but of “the successful collocation of contrasted or conflicting ‘meanings,’” 2 and he traces the theory back to Coleridge’s idea that poetry consists in the “balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” (Biographia Literaria, chap. xiv). Contrasted meanings defeat normal expectations, so the reader is forced to bridge (apparent) gaps in order to make sense of the words, and it is that collaboration between author and reader that constitutes poetic activity. The theory is, though Bateson does not present it as such, a reworking of the ancient notion that in a successful work of art we perceive unity in variety. This essay is an effort to extend and defend that theory in its modern form, particularly as it relates to literary works.The modern theory came into being because of a change in the [End Page 412] object of aesthetic analysis from the work and what it imitated to the psychology of the audience:Up to the eighteenth century the theory of art in the Western world was dominated by ancient philosophy. It was most of all Plato’s metaphysics which, in a number of variations and even distortions, attributed to the artist the capacity of perceiving the divine ideals of beauty beyond the world of the senses and embodying them in his creations. The rejection of this mystical view of art in the course of the eighteenth century... was bound to make theorists turn to psychology. 3It is within this psychological tradition that the modern version of unity and variety has been developed.Re-castings of the ancient formula for aesthetic value have been done by (at least) five recent theorists. Given that one can probably trace the twentieth-century revival back to Gestalt psychology, it is not surprising that the earliest of the four is Rudolph Arnheim. In an essay on “Order and Complexity in Landscape Design” he defines order as “the degree and kind of lawfulness governing the relations among the parts of an entity,” and complexity as “the multiplicity of the relationships among the parts of an entity.” 4 Arnheim then psychologizes (rather than “cosmologizes”) these concepts by grounding them in the propensity to be perceptually satisfied by a balance between the two: “Complexity without order produces confusion; order without complexity produces boredom” (p. 124). Similarly, in The Act of Reading Wolfgang Iser says:The reader’s enjoyment begins when he himself becomes productive, i.e., when the text allows him to bring his own faculties into play. There are, of course, limits to the reader’s willingness to participate, and these will be exceeded if the text makes things too clear or, on the other hand, too obscure: boredom and overstrain represent the two poles of tolerance, and in either case the reader is likely to opt out of the game. 5In the same vein, Francis Sparshott asserts in The Theory of the Arts that “Beauty occupies the ground between cliché and chaos,” with variety protecting against the former, unity protecting against the latter, 6 and in The Sense of... (shrink)

The Guide of the Perplexed, a monument of rabbinical exegesis written by Moses Maimonides at the end of the twelfth century, has exerted an immense and continuing influence on Jewish thought. Written as a letter to a disciple, The Guide of the Perplexed aims to liberate readers from a literal understanding of the Bible. It does so with an explanation of biblical terms related to key themes such as corporeality, place, humans, and nature. This reprint presents the Shlomo Pines translation, (...) the gold standard for decades, in a single volume for the first time. It also features an extensive introduction to the study of the guide by Leo Strauss, a leading authority on Maimonides. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article: Nikolaj Nottelmann, ‘Belief‐Desire Explanation’. Philosophy Compass Vol/Iss : 1–10. doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2011.00446.xAuthor’s Introduction“Belief‐desire explanation” is short‐hand for a type of action explanation that appeals to a set of the agent’s mental states consisting of 1. Her desire to ψ and 2. Her belief that, were she to φ, she would promote her ψ‐ing. Here, to ψ could be to eat an ice cream, and to φ could be to walk to the ice cream vendor. Adherents (...) of belief‐desire explanation, often labelled “Humeans”, standardly assume that appeals to such belief‐desire pairs sufficiently explain many human and animal actions, and also that all actions are explainable thus, at least in so far as they are guided by the agent’s intentions. Humeans take their lead from David Hume’s famous dictum that “Reason...is only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” In its original context, this passage from the Treatise is naturally taken to convey the thesis that mental states subservient to epistemic rationality – such as beliefs – are never in themselves sufficient to motivate action. Thus, an appeal to an agent’s beliefs is never in itself sufficient to lay bare her motivations and explain her actions, but must be supplemented by an appeal to “passions” such as desires. Many philosophers, so‐called Anti‐Humeans, have sharply disagreed. Some have pointed to certain beliefs with alleged motivational force in isolation from desires, most commonly evaluative beliefs. Others have argued that belief‐desire psychology fails to cut up mental space in a way fruitful to action explanation. Instead, only appeals to other types of mental state will adequately explain many types of intentional action. The debate for and against Humeanism is a highly complex one, which is likely to persist along with any general interest in the theory of action explanation.Author RecommendsHume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd ed. Edited and with an Analytical Index, by L. A. Selby‐Bigge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.Part III. Sect. III. of the Treatise is the classical source of the Humean view. Any in‐depth understanding of contemporary Humeanism must take it as its starting point.Stroud, Barry. Hume. London: Routledge, 1977.This is an excellent introductory text. Chap. VII treats on Humeanism and the key part of the Treatise listed above.Smith, Michael. ‘The Humean Theory of Motivation.’Mind 96.381 : 36–61.This is an authoritative modern account of Humeanism. Even if a bit imprecise in some regards, the text is lucidly written and nicely captures the structure of the debate over Humeanism.Schaefer‐Landau, Russ. Moral Realism. A Defence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003.Chapt. 5 contains another fine, more recent, introduction to Humeanism and the typical arguments for and against it. This introduction is particularly recommendable in virtue of its clarity and comprehensiveness.Ratcliffe, Matthew. Rethinking Commonsense Psychology. A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.This monograph treats on a very wide number of subjects pertaining to action explanation and harbours many highly controversial theses. Still, it is a refreshing eye‐opener re the immense complexity of the topic of action explanation and the great variety of such explanations in our folk practices. On my view Ratcliffe makes plausible the view that neither our folk practices nor our scientific practices single out a unique model of action explanation as the only appropriate one. Rather our practices of action explanation constitute a rather motley family. The consequence of this to the debates over Humeanism is obvious: The combatants must get clear on the exact models of action explanation within which they discuss the place of belief‐desire references instead of pretending to fight over action explanation in general.Gendler, Tamar Szabó. ‘Alief and Belief.’Journal of Philosophy 105 : 634–63.This paper, together with Gendler’s contemporary sister paper ‘Alief in Action ’, is an engaging proponent of the view that belief‐desire psychology and its associated practice of Human action explanations gets psychological reality radically wrong. Gendler presents a number of cases where, allegedly, relevant human actions are only explicable by appeal to a type of mental state, which Gendler dubs “alief”. Aliefs are neither beliefs nor desires; but share certain characteristics with both.Online MaterialsSample SyllabusWeek I: David Hume’s viewHume, Treatise, Part III. Sect III.Stroud: Hume, Chapt. VII.Week II: Modern HumeanismSmith, ‘The Humean Theory of Motivation’.Nottelmann, ‘Belief‐Desire Explanation’.Week III: Modern Humeanism continued: The Dialectics of the DebateSchaefer‐Landau, ‘Motivational Humeanism’.Week IV: Intention, Agency and CausationDavidson, Donald. ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ & ‘Freedom to Act’, both in: Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.Week V: Modern Anti‐Humeanism, The Neo‐Kantian VersionScanlon, T. M. What we Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1998, Chapt. 1. ‘Reasons’.Week VI: Modern Anti‐Humeanism, The Cognitive Science VersionGendler, Tamar Szabó. ‘Alief and Belief’, supplemented with excerpts of her ‘Alief in Action ’. Mind and Language 23.5 : 552–85.Focus Questions1 Which kinds of explanation do belief‐desire explanations belong to?2 In so far as belief‐desire explanations provide causal explanation of action, how are we to understand the causal nexus between belief‐desire pairs and successful agency?3 How are we to understand the notions of belief and desire as appealed to in belief‐desire explanations? Are they even conceptually distinct from the concept of a belief‐desire explanation of human action?4 May evaluative judgments such as moral judgments motivate and/or rationalize action in isolation from accompanying distinct co‐native states of the agent?5 Are certain types of intentional action better explained with sole reference to mental states different from belief as well as desire? (shrink)

Epistemic standards purport to tell us under what conditions we should adopt specific beliefs. In the scientific case, we might understand an epistemic standard as telling us what beliefs we should or even must adopt when faced with such-and-such evidence. It is an open question whether and to what extent science, or scientists, form beliefs based upon standards so construed. Epistemic relativism gives two strong arguments against a robust role for epistemic standards in science. This paper assesses (...) these arguments and argues that even if we accept them, epistemic standards play a strong, normative role and that failure to adhere to epistemic standards, in a sense to be clarified, risks irrationality. To make this argument, we must abandon the idea that standards determine in a strong sense what beliefs scientists must adopt and instead think of them as a guide for choosing between beliefs. If we think of standards in this way, then they can play a role in rational scientific discourse. This conception of standards is inspired by Kuhnian values and helps arbitrate between relativism and more rational conceptions of evidence and justification. The Chemical Revolution provides illustration of this view. (shrink)

"The Austin of the Jurisprudence of Administrative Law" This book originated as a series of lectures presented at Johns Hopkins in 1915. It proposes a method to supplement the established doctrine of constitutional law, which enforces legislative norms through negation and review, by a system of positive principles that would guide the making of statutes and give more definite meaning and content to the concept of due process. Highly regarded since its original publication in 1917 and the winner of Harvard (...) Law School's Ames Prize in 1919, it went on to become a standard work. It was recommended, to cite two examples, in Roscoe Pound's Introduction to American Law (1919) and Arthur Vanderbilt's Studying Law (1945). A comment published at the end of Freund's career summarizes a general opinion: "The great quality which Ernst Freund brought to the study of administrative law was his capacity for analysis. He was the Austin of the jurisprudence of administrative law." -W.I.J., Law Quarterly Review 49 (1933): 588. Ernst Freund [1864-1932] was Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Law at the University of Chicago. He is widely considered to be responsible for the development of administrative law in the United States. (shrink)

Standardization has emerged as the dominant principle guiding the organization and provision of healthcare, with standards resultantly shaping how nurses conceptualize and deliver patient care. Standardization has been critiqued as homogenizing diverse patient experiences and diminishing nurses’ skills and critical thinking; however, there has been limited examination of the philosophical implications of standardization for nursing knowledge and practice. In this manuscript, I draw on Foucault's philosophy of order and categorization to inform an analysis of the consequences of healthcare standardization (...) for the profession of nursing. I utilize three exemplars to illustrate the impact of the primacy of standardized thinking and practices on nurses, patients and families: pain assessments using the 0‐10 pain scale; patient triage emergency departments through the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale; and determination of cause of death within the context of the current opioid crisis. Through each exemplar, I demonstrate that standardization reductively constrains nursing knowledge and the health and healthcare experiences of patients and populations. I argue that the centrality of standardization must be re‐envisioned to embrace the complexity of health and more effectively and meaningfully frame nursing knowledge and practice within healthcare systems. (shrink)

Because other cultures classify mental disorders very differently from ours, it behooves us to inquire into the philosophical and cultural sources of our own guiding nosological categories. This paper is a philosophical exploration into the historical and theoretical bases of the late nineteenth-century, Kraepelinian division between disorders of mood or affect, and schizophrenia, in which our present day nosological categories are rooted. By tracing the early nosologists’ divisions into eighteenth-century and Kantian faculty psychology, and following the fate of faculty psychology (...) through the nineteenth century, we discover genealogical elements of our taxonomy likely to affect clinical diagnosis and understanding. (shrink)

Caregivers should usually accede to parents’ requests for life-sustaining treatment. For such decision-making, the best interests standard is too limited. John Arras’s “relational potential standard,” con-joined to a contemporary care ethics framework, provides a better guide.

This guide accompanies the following article: Matthew Kieran, ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value’. Philosophy Compass 1/2 (2006): pp. 129–143, doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2006.00019.x Author’s Introduction Up until fairly recently it was philosophical orthodoxy – at least within analytic aesthetics broadly construed – to hold that the appreciation and evaluation of works as art and moral considerations pertaining to them are conceptually distinct. However, following on from the idea that artistic value is (...) broader than aesthetic value, the last 15 years has seen an explosion of interest in exploring possible inter‐relations between the appreciative and ethical character of works as art. Consideration of these issues has a distinguished philosophical history but as the Compass survey article suggests (‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43), it is only very recently that figures in the field have returned to it to develop more precisely what they take the relationships to be and why. Consensus is, unsurprisingly, lacking. The reinvigoration of the issues has led sophisticated formalists or autonomists to mount a more considered defence of the idea that aesthetic and literary values are indeed conceptually distinct from the justification or otherwise of the moral perspective or views endorsed in a work (Topic I). The challenges presented by such a defence are many but amongst them are appeals to critical practice (Lamarque and Olsen), scepticism about whether or not art really can give us bona fide knowledge (Stolnitz) and the recognition that truth often seems to be far removed from what it is we value in our appreciation of works (Lamarque). One way to motivate consideration of the relevance of a work’s moral character to its artistic value concerns the phenomena of imaginative resistance. At least sometimes it would seem that, as Hume originally suggested, we either cannot or will not enter imaginatively into the perspective solicited by a work due to its morally problematic character (Topic II). In some cases, it would seem that as a matter of psychological fact, we cannot do so since it is impossible for us to imagine how it could be that a certain attitude or action is morally permissible or good (Walton). The question then is whether or not this is a function of morality in particular or constraints on imaginative possibility more generally and what else is involved. At other times, the phenomena seem to be driven by a moral reluctance to allow ourselves to enter into the dramatic perspective involved (Moran) or evaluation of the attitude expressed (Stokes). Nonetheless, it is far from obvious that this is so of all the attitudes or responses we judge to be morally problematic. After all, it looks like we can and indeed often do suspend or background particular cognitive and moral commitments in engaging with all sorts of works (Nichols and Weinberg). If the moral character of a work interacts with how we appreciate and evaluate them, then the pressing question is this: is there any systematic account of the relationship available to us? One way is to consider the relationship between our emotional responses to works and their moral character (Topic III). After all, art works often solicit various emotional responses from us to follow the work and make use of moral concepts in so doing (Carroll). Indeed, whether or not a work merits the sought for emotional responses often seems to be internally related to ethical considerations (Gaut). Yet, it is not obvious that we should apply our moral concepts or respond emotionally in our imaginative engagement with works as art as we should in real life (Kieran, Jacobson). A different route is via the thought that art can convey knowledge (Topic IV). There might be particular kinds of moral knowledge art distinctively suited to conveying (Nussbaum) or it may just be that art does so particularly effectively (Carroll, Gaut, Kieran). Either way where this can be tied to the artistic means and appreciation of a work it would seem that to cultivate moral understanding contributes to the value of a work and to betray misunderstanding is a defect. Without denying the relevance of the moral character of a work some authors have wanted to claim that sometimes the immoral aspect of a work can contribute to rather than lessen its artistic value (Topic V). One route is to claim that there is no systematic theoretical account of the relationship available and what the right thing to say is depends on the particular case involved (Jacobson). Another involves the claim that this is so when the defect connects up in an appropriate way to one of the values of art. Thus, it has been claimed, only where a work reveals something which adds to intelligibility, knowledge or understanding in virtue of its morally problematic aspect can this be so (Kieran). The latter position looks like it could in principle be held whilst nonetheless maintaining that the typical or standard relationship is as the moralists would have it. Yet perhaps allowing valence change for such reasons is less a mark of principled explanation and more a function of downright inconsistency or incoherence (Harold). The topics themselves and suggested readings given below follow the structure articulated above as further amplified in the Compass survey article. The design and structure given below can be easily compressed or expanded further. Author Recommends 1 Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 126–60. 2 This article develops the idea that engaging with narrative art calls on moral concepts and emotions and can thereby clarify our moral understanding. 2 Carroll, Noël. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 4 Part IV consists of six distinct essays on questions concerning the inter‐relations between art and morality including the essay cited above and the author’s articulation and defence of moderate moralism. 3 Gaut, Berys. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. 4 Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 7 This monograph provides the most exhaustive treatment of the issues and defends the claim that, where relevant, whenever a work is morally flawed it is of lesser value as art and wherever it is morally virtuous the work’s value as art is enhanced. Chapters 7 and 8 defend concern ethical knowledge and chapter 10 is a development of the article cited above concerning emotional responses. Chapter 3 also gives a useful conceptual map of the issues and options in the debate. 5 Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. 9 A wide ranging and extended treatment of relevant issues which objects to generalising moral treatments of our responses to art works and defends the idea that particular works can be better because of rather than despite their moral defects. 6 Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. 11 A general argument for immoralism is elaborated by outlining when, where and why a work’s morally problematic character can contribute to its artistic value for principled reasons (through enhancing moral understanding). 7 Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. 13 This chapter argues against both aestheticism and straightforward moralism about art, elaborating a defence of immoralism in relation to visual art whilst ranging over issues from pornographic art to the nature and demands of different genres in art. 8 Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’ Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. 15 This article concisely outlines and defends a sophisticated aestheticism that denies the importance of truth to artistic value. 9 Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. 17 This article articulates and defends the claim that no knowledge of any interesting or significant kind can be afforded by works appreciated and evaluated as art. 10 Walton, Kendall. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I.’Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. 68 (1994): 27–51. 19 This article builds on some comments from Hume to develop the idea that when engaging with fictions it seems impossible imaginatively to enter into radically deviant moral attitudes. Online Materials ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: The State of the Art.’American Society of Aesthetics online (Jeffrey Dean):. ‘Art, Censorship and Morality’ downloadable podcast of Nigel Warburton interviewing Matthew Kieran at Tate Britain (BBC/ou Open2.net as part of the Ethics Bites series):. ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43 (Matthew Kieran):. ‘Ethical Criticism of Art.’Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Ella Peek):. ‘Fascinating Fascism.’New York Review of Books Piece Discussing Leni Riefenstahl (Susan Sontag):. ‘The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1450s), Giovanni de Paolo’ (Tom Lubbock):. Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss Lolita (CBS):. Sample Syllabus Topic I Autonomism/aestheticism • Anderson, James C. and Jeffrey T. Dean. ‘Moderate Autonomism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 38.2 (1998): 150–66. • Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958. Chapter 12. • Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement.Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952 [1790]. • Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. • ——. ‘Tragedy and Moral Value.’Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73.2 (1995): 239–49. • Lamarque, Peter and Stein Olsen. Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Chapter 10. • Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. Topic II Imaginative Capacities, Intelligibility and Resistance • Moran, Richard. ‘The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.’Philosophical Review 103.1 (1994): 75–106. • Nichols, Shaun. ‘Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn’t Behave Like Believing’. Mind & Language 21.4 (2006): 459–74. • Stokes, Dustin. ‘The Evaluative Character of Imaginative Resistance’. British Journal of Aesthetics 46.4 (2006): 387–405. • Tanner, Michael. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, II’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 51–66. • Walton, Kendall (1994). ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 27–51. • Weinberg, Jonathan. ‘Configuring the Cognitive Imagination.’New Waves in Aesthetics. Eds. K. Stock and K. Thomson‐Jones. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 203–23. Topic III Moralism and Emotions • Carroll, Noël. ‘Moderate Moralism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 36.3 (1996): 223–37. • Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.126–60. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapter 10. • ——. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. • Hume, David. ‘Of the Standard of Taste.’Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993 [1757]. 133–53. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Emotions, Art and Immorality.’Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Emotions. Ed. Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 681–703. • Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art?. London: Penguin, 2004. Chapters 5 and 15. Topic IV Moralism and Knowledge • Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. M. Heath. London: Penguin, 1996 [367–322 BC]. • Carroll, Noël. ‘The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature and Moral Knowledge.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60.1 (2002): 3–26. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapters 7 and 8. • Gaut, Berys. ‘Art and Cognition.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 115–26. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Art, Imagination and the Cultivation of Morals.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54.4 (1996): 337–51. • Nussbaum, Martha. ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination.’Love’s Knowledge. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. 148–68. • Plato. The Republic. Trans. D. Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Book 10. Topic V Immoralist Contextualism • Harold, James. ‘Immoralism and the Valence Constraint.’British Journal of Aesthetics 48.1 (2008): 45–64. • Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. • ——. ‘Ethical Criticism and the Vices of Moderation.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 342–55. • John, Eileen. ‘Artistic Value and Moral Opportunism.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 331–41. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge:The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. • Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. • Patridge, Stephanie. ‘Moral Vices as Artistic Virtues: Eugene Onegin and Alice.’Philosophia 36.2 (2008): 181–93. Focus Questions 1 What is the strongest argument for the claim that the moral character of a work is not relevant to its artistic value? Does artistic or literary criticism tend to concern itself with the truth or morality of works? If so, in what ways? If not, why do you think this is? 2 What different explanations might there be for difficulty with or resistance to imaginatively entering into attitudes you take to be immoral? How might this relate to the way our imaginings work as contrasted with belief? How might different literary or artistic treatments of the same subject matter make a difference? 3 How do narrative works draw on our moral concepts and responses? Can we suspend our normal moral commitments or application of moral concepts in responding emotionally to art works? Should we respond emotionally to art works as we ought to respond to real world events we witness? Why? Why not? 4 How, if at all, do art works convey moral understanding? How, if at all, is this related to the kinds of moral knowledge art works can teach or reveal to us? When, where and why might this be tied to the artistic value of a work? How can we tell where a work enhances our moral understanding as opposed to misleading or distorting it? 5 What art works do you value overall as art which commend or endorse moral values and attitudes that you do not? Is appreciation of them always marred or lessened by the morally dubious aspect? If not, what explains the differences in evaluation? What, if anything, might you learn by engaging with works which endorse moral attitudes or apply moral concepts different from those you take to be justified? How, if at all, might this connect up with what makes them valuable as art? (shrink)

The revised Common Rule adopts the reasonable person standard to guide research disclosure. Some members of the research community contend that the standard is confusing and ill-suited to the research oversight system. Yet the revised rule is not as radical as it might seem. During the 1970s, judges started using the standard to evaluate negligence claims brought by injured patients who said doctors had failed to obtain informed consent to the harmful procedures. In its influential Belmont Report, the National Commission (...) recommended application of a “reasonable volunteer standard” to guide IRBs evaluating research disclosures. Evidence also suggests that IRBs often invoke the reasonable person standard in deliberations about consent forms. But past application of the standard has been informal and uneven. Robust application of the reasonable person standard will require researchers and IRBs to learn more about what ordinary people want and need to know about the studies they are invited to join. Input from people with personal experience as study participants could be particularly useful to this effort. (shrink)

The article briefly reviews the external pressures for teaching business ethics. It then summarizes why teaching business ethics across the curriculum is essentially a necessity in the current environment. This leads to a discussion of six commonly adopted elements used when seeking to improve a business ethics curriculum. The case study uses these six elements to provide insights into contemporary challenges facing many business schools. The particular contribution of this article is in the area of methods to assess the status (...) of the curriculum. The case study provides details about a faculty survey used as a compelling tool to kick-start a business ethics curriculum upgrade, not only based on the information that it yields, but the potent opportunity for conversation and collaboration. The conclusion summarizes the contemporary challenges and opportunities that business schools face. The instrument itself is in the appendix. (shrink)

In the course of the eighteenth century, understanding human cognitive life came to be construed as something to be explored in terms of the physiology of the sensory organs, the nerves, and the brain: a form of naturalization that effectively moved cognition out of the realm of philosophy as it had traditionally been understood. Bonnet's Analytical Essay on the Faculties of the Soul was at the forefront of these developments, and this is its first English translation. Drawing on his earlier (...) work in natural history -- he was the leading entomologist of his era -- he approaches problems of the nature of the mind via the physiology and anatomy of the brain and sensory systems. His approach is one of 'reverse engineering', starting from an organic statue without faculties, and investigating how it would need to be modified to produce a human being. Bonnet takes up a position that cuts across the standard understanding of the period as a clash between materialism and dualism. While his approach was rigorously naturalistic and physiological, this did not lead him to reject the notion of a soul. Instead, he argues that, in order to make sense of their sensory abilities, we need to attribute a soul to animals as well as human beings. At the same time, he argues that if personal immortality is to be possible, it can be conceived along the lines of insect metamorphosis, which shows how different biological forms can harbour a single identity.--dust jacket. (shrink)

The aim of the research is to identify the relationship between the performance criteria and the achievement of the objectives of supervision which is represented in the performance of the job at the Islamic University in Gaza Strip. To achieve the objectives of the research, the researchers used the descriptive analytical approach to collect information. The questionnaire consisted of (22) paragraphs distributed to three categories of employees of the Islamic University (senior management, faculty members, their assistants and members of the (...) administrative board). A random sample of 314 employees was selected, 276 responses were retrieved with a return rate of 88.1%. The SPSS program was used to enter, process, and analyze the data. The results of the study showed a positive relationship between the performance criteria and the achievement of the control objectives represented by the job performance in the Islamic University from the point of view of the members (senior management, faculty and their assistants and the administrative board). The researchers also recommended a number of recommendations, including the provision of an appropriate level of control system components today through the continuous updating and development of performance standards and the need to provide the necessary physical and financial resources to continue the development and achievement within the university. Expand the development of technology in the various activities of the university through the construction of a complete and integrated system to support the control systems in the university to suit its size. The researchers also recommended the follow-up, review of the performance standards and work to modify them in line with the mission of the university and the goals that the university seeks to reach. (shrink)

Some students find philosophy engrossing; others are merely bewildered. How can professors meet the challenge of teaching introductory-level philosophy so that their students, regardless of initial incentive or skill, come to understand and even enjoy the subject? For nearly a decade, renowned philosopher and teacher Steven M. Cahn offered doctoral students a fourteen-week, credit-bearing course to prepare them to teach undergraduates. At schools where these instructors were appointed, department chairs reported a dramatic increase in student interest. In this book, Cahn (...) captures the essence of that course. Yet many of the topics he discusses concern all faculty, regardless of subject: a teacher's responsibilities, the keys to effective instruction, the proper approach to term papers, examinations, and grades; and suggestions for how administrators should demonstrate that they take teaching seriously. Such matters are covered in the first seven chapters and in the final, fourteenth chapter. The intermediate six chapters focus on teaching introductory philosophy and, in particular, on critical thinking, free will, philosophy of religion, ethics, and political philosophy. Cahn's writing is lucid and lively, using vivid examples and avoiding educational jargon. In sum, this book is not only a guide on how to inspire students but also an inspiration for teachers themselves. (shrink)