Anita Chari revives the concept of reification from Marx and the Frankfurt School to spotlight the resistance to neoliberal capitalism now forming at the level of political economy and at the more sensate, experiential level of subjective transformation. Reading art by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine, Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg, as well as the politics of Occupy Wall Street, Chari identifies practices through which artists and activists have challenged neoliberalism's social and political logics, exposing its inherent tensions (...) and contradictions. (shrink)

How do I know whether there are any minds beside my own? This problem of other minds in philosophy raises questions which are at the heart of all philosophical investigations--how it is that we know, what is in the mind, and whether we can be certain about any of our beliefs. In this book, Anita Avramides begins with a historical overview of the problem from the Ancient Skeptics to Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, and Wittgenstein. The second part of (...) the book investigates the views of influential contemporary philosophers such as Strawson, Davidson, Nagel and Searle. (shrink)

One of the most intriguing of philosophical puzzles concerns other minds. How do you know there are any? Yes, you're surrounded by living organisms that look and behave much as you do. They even say they have minds. But do they? Perhaps other humans are mindless zombies: like you on the outside, but lacking any inner conscious life, including emotions, thoughts, experiences and even pain. What grounds do you possess for supposing that other humans aren't zombies? Perhaps less than you (...) think. Anita Avramides tackles this fascinating question. (shrink)

'Anita L. Allen breaks new ground...A stunning indictment of women's status in contemporary society, her book provides vital original scholarly research and insight.' |s-NEW DIRECTIONS FOR WOMEN.

The Gricean account of language is at the center of much current work in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Anita Avramides maintains that Grice's paradigm can be used to defend very different conceptions of mind and of meaning. In this clearly argued book she describes Grice's analysis of meaning and proposes two interpretations of it, one reductive and one nonreductive. Much current work in cognitive science assumes that the content of words and thoughts can be (...) explained in naturalistic terms. A leading idea (advanced mainly by Stephen Schiffer and Brian Loar) is that the naturalistic account of content will proceed in two stages: a reduction of the semantic features of word; to the contents of propositional attitudes and then a reduction of the latter to physical or functional notions. The appeal of Grice's work on meaning to this two stage reductionist strategy is that Gricean definitions seem to provide the only way of reducing the semantic to the psychological, a reduction that is required for a naturalistic account of intentionality. While Avramides defends the method of analysis as one suited to the concept of meaning, she rejects a reductive interpretation of the analysis. She argues that any attempt to reduce the semantic to the psychological leads to a mistaken conception of mind. She exposes the assumptions behind the reductive interpretation and offers fresh and original arguments for the antireductionist position. Against the reductive Gricean she defends the idea that there is a deep epistemological symmetry between semantic and propositional attitude notions, a result of which is that semantically characterized linguistic behavior is central to our concept of belief. Anita Avramides is Lecturer in Philosophy at The Queens College, The University of Oxfor. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

For decades a debate has played out in the literature about who bioethicists are, what they do, whether they can be considered professionals qua bioethicists, and, if so, what professional responsibilities they are called to uphold. Health care ethics consultants are bioethicists who work in health care settings. They have been seeking guidance documents that speak to their special relationships/duties toward those they serve. By approving a Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibilities for Health Care Ethics Consultants, the American Society (...) for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) has moved the professionalization debate forward in a significant way. This first code of ethics focuses on individuals who provide health care ethics consultation (HCEC) in clinical settings. The evolution of the code's development, implications for the field of HCEC and bioethics, and considerations for future directions are presented here. (shrink)

This article engages Axel Honneth’s recent work on Georg Lukács’ concept of reification in order to formulate a politically relevant and historically specific critique of capitalism that is applicable to theorizing contemporary democratic practice. I argue that Honneth’s attempt to reorient the critique of reification within the terms of a theory of recognition has done so at the cost of sacrificing the core of the concept, which forged a connection between the socio-political analysis of capitalist domination and an analysis of (...) the unengaged, spectatorial stance of human beings toward the world, showing how they together impede emancipatory social transformation. In order to accomplish the unfinished task of rendering the critique of reification applicable to contemporary critical theory, I seek to synthesize the advantages of Honneth’s approach, which focuses on the normative aspects of the critique of reification, with Lukács’ emphasis on the practical, political-economic dimensions of reification and the historically specific pathologies of the capitalist social form. (shrink)

Cet article s’inscrit dans la continuité des études sur l’utilisation des corpus oraux comme ressource didactique en français langue étrangère. Il présente les défis sous-jacents à la construction d’un exercice sous format numérique à partir de l’expression polysémique genre à l’oral. L’exercice a été développé dans le cadre du projet de recherche appliquée DiCoi (Digitalisation – Corpus – Interaction), dont le but est de soutenir le développement de la compétence d’interaction orale de jeunes en formation professionnelle de métiers manuels. L’effet (...) des interventions est mesuré à l’aide de feedback, mais aussi de la collecte d’interactions orales libres enregistrées sous format audio. La réception de l’exercice est généralement positive, mais l’analyse du phénomène dans le corpus d’interaction entre allophones révèle la difficulté d’établir un lien clair entre input et output. Néanmoins, une didactisation soigneuse du matériel authentique semble rendre les phénomènes cibles saillants. (shrink)

Human dignity is grounded in basic human attributes such as life and self-respect. When people cannot stand up for themselves they may lose their dignity towards themselves and others. The aim of this study was to elucidate if dignity remains intact for family members during care procedures in a children’s hospital. A qualitative approach was adopted, using open non-participation observation. The findings indicate that dignity remains intact in family-centred care where all concerned parties encourage each other in a collaborative relationship. (...) Dignity is shattered when practitioners care from their own perspective without seeing the individual in front of them. When there is a break in care, family members can restore their dignity because the interruption helps them to master their emotions. Family members’ dignity is shattered and remains damaged when they are emotionally overwhelmed; they surrender themselves to practitioners’ care, losing their self-esteem and self-respect. (shrink)

Background: Nursing care is rapidly evolving due to the advanced technological and medical development, and also due to an increased focus on standardization and the logic of production, permeating today’s hospital cultures. Nursing is rooted in a holistic approach with an ethical obligation to maintain and respect the individual’s dignity and integrity. However, working within time limits and heavy workload leads to burnout and ethical insensitivity among nurses, and may challenge nurses’ options to act on the basis of ethical and (...) moral grounds in the individual care situation. Aim: The aim of this study is to describe and discuss ethical dilemmas described and experienced by nurses in clinical practice today. Method: The study was performed as a literature review following the matrix method allowing to synthesize literature across methodological approaches. A literature search was performed, including relevant studies published between 2011 and 2016. A total of 15 articles were included and analyzed focusing on their description of ethical dilemmas. Ethical consideration: We have considered and respected ethical conduct when performing a literature review, respecting authorship and referencing sources. Results: The analysis revealed three themes, relating to important aspects of nursing practice, such as the nurse–patient relationship, organizational structures, and collaboration with colleagues. The findings are summarized in the following three themes: (1) balancing harm and care, (2) work overload affecting quality, and (3) navigating in disagreement. Ethically difficult situations are evident across settings and in very diverse environments from neonatal care to caring for the older people. Organizational structures and being caught in-between professional values, standardization, and busyness was evident, revealing the complexity of nursing practice and the diversity of ethical dilemmas, concerns, and distress experienced by clinical nurses. Conclusion: Nursing practice is challenged by organizational structures and the development of the health care system, inhibiting nurses’ professional decision-making and forcing them to compromise basic nursing values. (shrink)

Accountability protects public health and safety, facilitates law enforcement, and enhances national security, but it is much more than a bureaucratic concern for corporations, public administrators, and the criminal justice system. In Why Privacy Isn't Everything, Anita L. Allen provides a highly original treatment of neglected issues affecting the intimacies of everyday life, and freshly examines how a preeminent liberal society accommodates the competing demands of vital privacy and vital accountability for personal matters. Thus, "None of your business!" is (...) at times the wrong thing to say, as much of what appears to be self-regarding conduct has implications for others that should have some bearing on how a person chooses to act. (shrink)

In this photo essay, we take readers through ecologies of de/colonization that we engage with in our creative methodology of walking and talking. As academics called upon to do equity, diversity and decolonization work in colonial institutions, we reflect on our location in lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ lands (“Victoria, BC, Canada”) and the circuits that extend to the Caribbean archipelago of our origins and families (Borikén/Puerto Rico and Jamaica). We take up the tasks of collectively reflecting on how to care for (...) our communities and for each other in an interconnected world amidst socio-ecological crisis. Our method that emerged during the pandemic is specific to our embodiments “here” as settlers of Caribbean roots whose family histories “there” include both complicity with and domination by colonization, trans-Atlantic enslavement, and forced migration. We are attempting to learn, as we hold the messiness of institutions who want straightforward paths to remediate racism, colonization, and the like. Our walking and talking follow a meandering and re-visiting process prompted by our institutional contexts and circumstances, and also by serendipity, surprise and beauty offered through non-human elements on our walks. The photos evidence these moments and the connections to “here-there” in ecologies of de/colonization. We invite readers on our circuitous paths that involve deconstructing, and building or affirming, noticing, following literal paths and those in scholarly-activist circles. In the creative process of drawing relations of the here-there, and attending to serendipity, ancestral spirit, and more-than-human agency, we witness and imagine worlds otherwise (King et al., 2020). These circuitous roots and routes offer possibilities of reckoning, repairing and re-worlding. (shrink)

The analysis of the operation of tourism companies will provide valid information for the design of policies to reactivate the tourism industry, which has been strongly affected during the pandemic generated by COVID-19. The objective of this paper is to use soft computing techniques to analyse tourism companies in Ecuador. First of all, dimensionality reduction methods are applied: principal component analysis, isometric feature mapping and locally linear embedding, on data of tourism enterprises in Ecuador for the year 2015. In addition, (...) to verify the trend of operational variables, the data of tourism companies in Ecuador in 2019 and 2020 are analysed with dimensionality reduction methods that improve the interpretation by minimizing the loss of information. The data sets are analysed with k-means, k-medoids and Hierarchical Clustering, generating groups according to similar characteristics. The optimal number of clusters is determined with the following: Elbow Method, Silhouette Coefficient, Davies-Bouldin Index and Dunn Index. In addition, an analysis of the operation of tourism companies in the year 2020 concerning previous years is included. The study allows exploring Soft Computing techniques to identify important information for the definition of strategies that contribute to an effective reactivation of the tourist industry of Ecuador. (shrink)

According to a popular view, the past is present here and now. This is presentism combined with endurantism: the past continuously persists through time to the present. By contrast, I argue that memories, memorials, and histories are of entities discontinuous with present experiences, and that the continuity between past and present in them is a construct. Memories, memorials, and histories are semantic means for dealing with the past. My presupposition that past and present are different is supported by grammar: as (...) verbal tenses show, the past is not present here and now, for otherwise it would not be past. A failure to note this difference is a lack of chronesthesia, a sense of time specific to human beings. I argue that presentism fails to account for the temporal structures of memory and the changes in perspective as we switch from the present to a past situation. My account is perdurantist in the sense that it allows for temporal parts of things such as memorials or tombstones, as well as events such as wars or commemorations. But my main goal is to outline a semantic approach to the past: the tie between past and present actions and events is the semantic ground–consequence relation: a past event is the antecedent grounding a present situation, explaining why it is the case. In addition, I show how we refer to the past by means of two rhetorical figures of speech: synecdoche, using the part–whole relation for relating the past to the present by transposing its sense; and anaphor, which has a deictic function—it points back toward the past. In references to the past, the deictic field is a scene visualized by the speaker and addressees: the deictic field is transposed from a perceptual to an imaginary space. (shrink)

The paper evaluates Christopher Hookway's claim that individual epistemic vice can enhance the value of collective epistemic virtue. I suggest that this claim can be defended on the grounds of a dynamic account of collective intentional properties that is supplemented by an account of a spontaneous ordering mechanism such as the "intangible hand". Both these accounts try to explain how individual traits integrate into collective traits by way of aggregation. In this respect, they are different from normative and summative accounts (...) of plural subjects. I argue that it is the repeatable and self-amplifying nature of character traits that calls for a dynamic account of collective virtues. With regard to epistemic virtues and their role in the acquisition of knowledge I hold that their dynamic and self-amplifying character warrants their reliability, since it is this character that bottoms out in repeated acts of epistemally correct behavior that constitute a 'responsible practice'. The successful appliance of the latter amplifies the attitude it origins from. If epistemic virtues construed along these lines are attributed to collectives, a dynamic aggregate account supplemented by an account of an "intan-gible hand" device might explain how an aggregate of virtuous efforts of individuals can not only absorb a certain amount of vice but be even enhanced by the 'spice' of some non-intentional epistemically vicious side effects of epistemically virtuous en- deavor. (shrink)

Akabayashi and Slingsby's (2006) article reminds us that the North American emphasis on individualistic autonomy is not universal. As the authors explain, personal identity in Japan is not construc...

Can the government stick us with privacy we don't want? It can, it does, and according to this author, may need to do more of it. Privacy is a foundational good, she argues, a necessary tool in the liberty-lover's kit for a successful life. A nation committed to personal freedom must be prepared to mandate inalienable, liberty-promoting privacies for its people, whether they eagerly embrace them or not. The eight chapters of this book are reflections on public regulation of privacy (...) at home; isolation and confinement for punitive and health reasons; religious modesty attire; erotic nudity; workplace and professional confidentiality; racial privacy; online transactions; social networking; and the collection, use and storage of electronic data. (shrink)

In Third Digital Documentary: A Theory and Practice of Transmedia Arts Activism, Critical Design and Ethics Anita Chang offers a theory and methodology of transmedia arts activism within the technocultural and sociopolitical landscape of expanded documentary production, distribution, reception and participation. Through a detailed analysis of her transmedia project on indigenous and minority language endangerment and revival that consists of the feature-length documentary Tongues of Heaven, and the companion web application Root Tongue: Sharing Stories of Language Identity and Revival, (...) she reveals the layers and depths that comprise a critical arts practice when confronted with complex sociopolitical issues while working with multiple communities across territorial/national boundaries. In the context of the growing field of transmedia documentaries, Chang discusses the potentials and benefits of a critical design practice and production ethics that can transform this field to pilot new collaborations in documentary and digital media platforms towards a third digital documentary. (shrink)

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Joshua Rager and Peter Schwartz suggest using opioid treatment agreements as public health monitoring tools to inform patients about “the requirements entailed by undergoing opioid therapy,” rather than as contractual agreements to alter patients’ individual behavior or to benefit them directly. Because Rager and Schwartz's argument presents suspected OTA violations as a justification to stop providing opioids yet does not highlight the broader epistemic and systemic context within which clinicians prescribe these medications, (...) their proposal may perpetuate a climate of distrust and stigmatization without correcting systemic factors that may have placed patients and others at risk in the first place. Given the context of epistemic uncertainty regarding opioid safety and efficacy, insufficient training for opioid prescribers, and inadequate patient education, I propose replacing OTAs, which have a narrow focus on patient behaviors, with opioid treatment plans, which would promote mutual, collaborative, and shared decision-making on the most appropriate pain management program. An OTP can be ethically justified as a tool to prevent and treat iatrogenic addiction under a specific paradigm—one that adopts a default position of professional epistemic humility and holds all collaborative parties accountable in chronic pain management. (shrink)

The study investigates the conceptualizations and ideologies concerning family destruction metaphors in same-sex marriage debates. With data from the official websites of two opposing camps in Taiwan, we explore the ways conceptual metaphors can be adopted along with other linguistic resources to shape, redefine and negotiate new meanings of family. Drawing concepts from critical metaphor analysis (CMA), this study shows that the same conceptual metaphor can be used in different contexts to construct and promote seemingly binary ideologies. The adoption of (...) family destruction metaphor suggests that family, ideally a complete, stable, and wholesome environment, is commonly accepted by campaigners as a destructible object worthy of protection. However, the different contextual use of this metaphor showed ideological differences in the ideal membership for marriage, the attackers and protectors of family, the victims of family destruction, and the causes and consequences of family destruction. By inviting the audience to make their own evaluation and interpretation of the metaphor, sensitive arguments can be made in a less direct but emotional manner to achieve the purpose of persuasion. Our results illustrate that conceptual metaphors can be used to reinforce conventional beliefs or introduce new values within a socially accepted frame. (shrink)

The studies presented here in this work have a central point of departure: it is remarkable that we, as biological organisms in a social world, configure our lives in terms of selves. This book succeeds in brining together different but related disciplines concerned with people and the histories and conditions of their lives. The answer worked out to the central question addressed is thus an optimistic one in that it shows the niche for knowledge of human nature and the texts (...) that enfold lives, and of cause-effect links and meaningful things. (shrink)