Women educators played an essential role in transforming public museums that had been focused on collections and research into effective educational and informational sites that engaged broad publics. Three significant innovators were Delia Griffin of St. Johnsbury Museum in Vermont who emphasized hands-on learning, Anna Billings Gallup who shaped a distinctive model museum for children in Brooklyn and Laura Bragg of the Charleston Museum who established strong collaboration with the local public schools. Joining museum curatorial staffs and (...) professional associations that were largely male, these women educators and their peers typically provided pedagogical insights and teaching skills that enabled them to work effectively with school systems, teachers, pupils and parents. Genuinely interested in natural science, they shaped careers which included opportunities to engage with science, provided a considerable degree of autonomy and enabled them to experiment with hands-on learning. They built networks of museum educators and influenced the young American Association of Museums. Women museum educators created a bridge between semi-public natural history establishments for collection, preservation and scientific research and an active audience of teachers, pupils, visitors and patrons. Their efforts transformed museums into sites for education and broad public access to science in the early 20th century. (shrink)

Much can be learned from burgeoning climate action movements in thousands of majority world rural communities. Land degradation has increased the vulnerability of over three billion people to famine, food insecurity, water shortages, and increasingly severe weather events, trapping climate-vulnerable communities in vicious cycles of impoverishment. Yet, many communities are learning through local climate action how to escape these cycles. We offer the case of Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) as one example to understand the conditions under which impoverished rural communities (...) address ecological degradation. Combining simple reforestation action with a community engagement approach enables farming households using FMNR to regreen their landscapes, increase food security, reduce poverty, increase resilience to climate change and transform rural development. Communities in at least 29 countries are practising FMNR, reforesting tens of millions of hectares of land, strengthening communities, and restoring landscapes. Synergies between FMNR and faith-based moral principles help boost its embrace. Across the majority world, moral imagination and reasoning help motivate emotions that sustain farmers’ local action through their hope of a better future and scale up globally important community-based agricultural movements. Such collective action movements harness synergies between climate justice, poverty reduction, and human flourishing. (shrink)

This article aims to discuss conceptual levels of narrative representations of utterances based on reported speech frames employed in presidential speeches. It adopts some assumptions from Chilton’s Deictic Space Theory and Cap’s Proximisation Theory, both primarily used to indicate exclusive reference, a clash of interests and threat-oriented conceptualisation of events. This article, however, extends their scope to include strategies for inclusion and positive image construction and makes a distinction between primary, secondary and tertiary embedding as discursive means that contribute to (...) presentation of self and legitimisation. Data for this research comprise a corpus of 125 presidential speeches divided into three subcorpora: JKC – John Kennedy Corpus, BCC – Bill Clinton Corpus, and BOC – Barrack Obama Corpus. A total of 1251 instances of narrative reports have been analysed to investigate primary and multilevel embedding, which constitute the basis for this study. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 489 Anna Romina Guevarra and Maya Arcilla The Source of Actual Terror: The Philippine Macho-Fascist Duterte  What is JUSTICE with the violence you’ve waged  What is FREEDOM? Our people are encaged  What is JUSTICE with the violence you’ve waged?  What is FREEDOM? Our people are encaged  We have nothing to lose—nothing but (...) our chains  We have nothing to lose—nothing but our chains  Ang tao, ang bayan—ngayon ay lumalaban  Ngayon ay lumalaban—ang tao ang bayan 1  We will, we will oust you!  We will, we will oust you! —Lyrics of a chant at a Chicago protest rally, July 8, 20202 On July 8, 2020, in front of the Philippine Consulate of Chicago, a group of activists representing multiple transnational organizations committed to the pursuit of democracy, participated in a Global Day of Action against an Anti-Terrorism Law (ATL) passed in the Philippines five days earlier. This particular rally was led by fierce student and community organizers and workers who loudly proclaimed their opposition to President Rodrigo Duterte’s misogynistic and fascist measures. The epigraph 1. The people, the nation—today they fight / Today they fight—the people, the nation. 2. Song written by Charmaine Balisalisa. 490 Anna Romina Guevarra and Maya Arcilla above captures the lyrics of one young activist’s chant directed at Duterte and choreographed to the tune of Queen’s “We will Rock You.” People followed her steps and gestures rhythmically and in unison, accompanying her chant with sounds from a gangsa (gong), bells, a skateboard tapping the ground, and an empty bucket. There have been multiple protests denouncing Duterte since he assumed power in 2016, but on this particular day, the sense of outrage and urgency was especially palpable in the face of this new law aimed at suppressing dissent. This legislation marked a high point in Duterte’s efforts to exert authoritarian control, and it is significant that opposition to his regime has taken on a specifically feminist character. The Philippines Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 (Republic Act No. 11479), signed into law on July 3, 2020, amends the Philippines Human Security Act of 2007 by expanding the government’s power and scope for defining what constitutes “terrorism.” It consolidates power through the creation of an Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC) appointed by the President and empowered to act without oversight from the judiciary or legislature. The ATC can order mass arrests without warrants and detain individuals without due process for the mere suspicion of being involved in “terrorist” activities. This Law violates the Philippine Constitution’s Bill of Rights by eliminating free speech, violating the people’s right to privacy, and criminalizing individuals on suspicion of wrongdoing. As the law stipulates, anyone involved in “creating an atmosphere and spreading a message of fear” and “provoking or influencing by intimidation the government or any of its international organizations” will be construed as inciting terrorism. Indeed, this law will continue to erode democratic governance in the country, with some labeling it a “stealth declaration of martial law.”3 As US Congressional Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) noted at the press conference she convened on July 15 to publicly call for the Anti-Terrorism Law’s repeal, “this law represents a new weapon in the administration’s campaign to suppress dissent and will worsen attacks on ordinary people.” 3. Jodesz Gavilan, “‘Stealth Declaration of Martial Law’: Rights Groups Slam Duterte, Anti-Terror Law,” Rappler, July 3, 2020, https://rappler.com/nation /human-rights-groups-statements-duterte-signing-anti-terror-law. Anna Romina Guevarra and Maya Arcilla 491 “A Timeline of Terror”: From “Pride is a Protest” and #JusticeForFabelPineda to #HandsOffGabriela4 A number of prominent feminists and queer rights activists have been targeted under President Duterte in the lead up to the passing of the ATL. On June 26, twenty LGBTQ activists representing Bahaghari, an LGBTQ+ rights organization in the Philippines, were arrested at a Pride rally. These protestors, referred to as the “Pride 20,” were speaking out against the ATL and were immediately arrested.5 A few days later, fifteen-year-old Fabel Pineda from San Juan Ilocos Sur was gunned... (shrink)

At a White House ceremony in October 1995, the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments presented its Final Report to President Bill Clinton. The 925-page report and the over 2,000 pages of supplemental volumes summarized eighteen months of investigative research, debate, and deliberation on historical and contemporary issues in human subjects research. The Advisory Committee's efforts were aided by unprecedented support from the highest levels of the executive branch, including the heads of eight cabinet-level agencies and their departments' resources. The (...) presidentially appointed committee and its staff delved into long-forgotten Cold Warera government archives, listened to hours of public testimony, interviewed key players in the development of medical therapies and nuclear weapons, and studied ethical issues arising in today's research.In this article we focus on a critical, but narrowly defined, part of the Advisory Committee's Final Report: remedying harms or wrongs to subjects of human radiation experiments conducted or sponsored by the U.S. government between 1944 and 1974. (shrink)

Society has historically not taken a benign view of genetic disease. The laws permitting sterilization of the mentally re tarded~ and those proscribing consanguineous marriages are but two examples. Indeed as far back as the 5th-10th centuries, B.C.E., consanguineous unions were outlawed (Leviticus XVIII, 6). Case law has traditionally tended toward the conservative. It is reactive rather than directive, exerting its influence only after an individual or group has sustained injury and brought suit. In contrast, state legislatures have not been (...) inhibited in enacting statutes. Many of their products can be characterized as hasty, unnecessary, ill-conceived, and based on the heart rather than the head. Moreover the lack of expert consultation sought has also been remarkable. One state legislature, for example, has advocated immunization for sickle cell anemia! Many others have enacted laws for the screening of inborn errors of metabolism, e.g., phenylketon uria, but have poorly defined the lines of responsibility to secure compliance. A spate of specific disease-related bills has emerged in the u.S. Congress, each seeking recognition and appropriations. Sickle cell anemia, hemophilia, Cooley's anemia and Tay-Sachs disease have been among the front-runners for support. Finally, in 1975, Congress has begun to examine an omnibus bill concerning all forms of genetic disease. The bill, termed the National Genetic Diseases Act is, however, still far from being enacted. (shrink)

Timeless Radcliffe: A Review of Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic - Tomasz Fisiak Yeats’s Genres and Tensions: A Review of Charles I. Armstrong’s Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History - Wit Pietrzak Review of Anna Pochmara’s The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance - Antoni Górny “Artful Exaggeration” - Krzysztof Majer Interviews Bill Gaston Transcultural Theatre in the UK - Uilleam Blacker Talks to Joanna Kosmalska.

From around 1800, particularly in Germany, Greek tragedy has been privileged in popular and scholarly discourse for its relation to apparently timeless metaphysical, existential, ethical, aesthetic, and psychological questions. As a major concern of modern philosophy, it has fascinated thinkers including Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity considers this tradition of philosophy in relation to the ancientGreek works themselves, and mediates between the concerns of classicists and those of intellectual historians and philosophers.

The U.S. civilian space program is focused on planning for a new round of human missions to the Moon and, later, perhaps, to Mars. These plans are intended to realize a “vision” for exploration articulated by President George W. Bush. It is important to examine this “vision” in the broader context of 21st-century space exploration, which is a truly global enterprise. Questions to be addressed include the following: How will extending human presence into the solar system affect society and culture (...) on Earth? What legal, ethical, and other value systems should govern human settlements and other activities in space? Do humans have rights to exploit extraterrestrial resources and alter extraterrestrial environments? Does space exploration need reinvention to meet social needs? This article describes the current environment for space policy making and a framework of space law, ethics, and culture within which these questions can be considered. (shrink)

As early-career neuroethicists, we come to the field of neuroethics at a unique moment: we are well-situated to consider nearly two decades of neuroethics scholarship and identify challenges that have persisted across time. But we are also looking squarely ahead, embarking on the next generation of exciting and productive neuroethics scholarship. In this article, we both reflect backwards and turn our gaze forward. First, we highlight criticisms of neuroethics, both from scholars within the field and outside it, that have focused (...) on speculation and lack of skepticism; the dearth of consideration of broader social issues such as justice and equality, both with regard to who speaks for neuroethics as a field and who benefits from its recommendations and findings; and the insufficient focus on the practical impact of our ethical work. Second, we embrace the concept of “translational neuroethics” to outline a vision for neuroethics that is integrated, inclusive, and impactful. Integration can help us identify more pertinent, real-world issues, and move away from speculation; inclusivity can help ensure that the questions we attend to are not merely relevant to a single subgroup but aim toward just distribution of benefits; and impact can help us think beyond guidelines and recommendations to focus on implementation. Our goal is for this call to action to help shape neuroethics into a discipline that develops rigorous research agendas through relationships with interdisciplinary partners, that is broadly inclusive and attends to issues beyond novel neurotechnologies, and that is devoted to the translation of scholarship into practice. (shrink)

Why did Greek tragedy and "the tragic" come to be seen as essential to conceptions of modernity? And how has this belief affected modern understandings of Greek drama? In Genealogy of the Tragic, Joshua Billings answers these and related questions by tracing the emergence of the modern theory of the tragic, which was first developed around 1800 by thinkers associated with German Idealism. The book argues that the idea of the tragic arose in response to a new consciousness of (...) history in the late eighteenth century, which spurred theorists to see Greek tragedy as both a unique, historically remote form and a timeless literary genre full of meaning for the present. The book offers a new interpretation of the theories of Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, and others, as mediations between these historicizing and universalizing impulses, and shows the roots of their approaches in earlier discussions of Greek tragedy in Germany, France, and England. By examining eighteenth-century readings of tragedy and the interactions between idealist thinkers in detail, Genealogy of the Tragic offers the most comprehensive historical account of the tragic to date, as well as the fullest explanation of why and how the idea was used to make sense of modernity. The book argues that idealist theories remain fundamental to contemporary interpretations of Greek tragedy, and calls for a renewed engagement with philosophical questions in criticism of tragedy. (shrink)

Background Concepts of health have been widely discussed in the philosophy and ethics of medicine. Parallel to these theoretical debates, numerous empirical research projects have focused on subjective concepts of health and shown their significance for individuals and society at various levels. Only a few studies have so far investigated the concepts of health of non-professionals and professionals involved in long-term home care and discussed these empirical perspectives regarding moral responsibilities. Objectives To identify the subjective concepts of the health of (...) non-professionals (care recipients, informal caregivers) and professionals (registered nurses) involved in long-term home care and to discuss them against the background of existing normative guidelines addressing non-professionals and professionals’ responsibilities and rights concerning health. Research design A qualitative design was chosen to explore subjective concepts of health. Data were collected by semi-structured interviews; content analysis was applied according to Mayring. Participants and research context Twenty-eight interviews were conducted with non-professionals and professionals in long-term home care arrangements in Northern Germany. Ethical considerations Ethics approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Board at the University Medicine Greifswald (BB123/16). Findings Non-professionals and professionals consider health as a capability that enables them to participate in social activities and live their own lives according to their preferences. The former regard health particularly as a feeling and an attitude, the latter as the absence of disease with a focus on mental and emotional well-being. Both groups highlight the unsurpassable value of health and the personal responsibility for it. Discussion Normative guidelines applicable to practice in long-term home care discuss responsibilities and rights unevenly and raise several problems regarding non-professionals and professionals’ subjective concepts of health. Conclusion Individuals’ concepts of health are relevant for the subsequent interpretation of rights and responsibilities and should, thus, be reflected upon to address health-related needs effectively. (shrink)

The rule of double effect is regularly invoked in ethical discussions about palliative sedation, terminal extubation and other clinical acts that may be viewed as hastening death for imminently dying patients. Unfortunately, the literature tends to employ this useful principle in a fashion suggesting that it offers the final word on the moral acceptability of such medical procedures. In fact, the rule cannot be applied appropriately without invoking moral theories that are not explicit in the rule itself. Four tenets of (...) the rule each require their own ethical justification. A variety of moral theories are relevant to making judgements in a pluralistic society. Much of the rich moral conversation germane to the rule has been reflected in arguments about physician-asssisted suicide and voluntary active euthanasia, but the rule itself has limited relevance to these debates, and requires its own moral justifications when applied to other practices that might hasten death. (shrink)

This article argues against Anna Stilz's recent attempt to solve the problem of citizens' collective responsibility in democratic states. I show that her solution could only apply to state actions that are (in legal terminology) unjustified but excusable. Stilz's marquee case – the 2003 invasion of Iraq – does not, I will argue, fit this bill; nor, in all likelihood, does any other case in recorded history. Thus, this article concludes, we may allow that Stilz's argument offers a theoretically (...) cogent case for citizens' task-responsibility in democratic states (given the right conditions); it just so happens that few if any cases satisfy these conditions. (shrink)

While the scientific discourse on astrobiology—the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe—leans toward optimism about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, optimistic thinking is tempered by the limits of evidence and observations gathered thus far. Most astrobiologists assume that “first contact” with extraterrestrial life, if it is ever to occur, will likely be the discovery of microbial life elsewhere in our solar system. But in popular culture, “first contact” tends to be characterized as contact with (...) extraterrestrial intelligence. This article will touch on theory and research relating to the origins and evolution of life and intelligence on Earth and speculation about extraterrestrial life and intelligence. (shrink)

Background Professional care workers face ethical issues in long-term care settings (LTCS) for older adults. They need to be independent and responsible, despite limited resources, a shortage of skilled professionals, global and societal changes, and the negative reputation of LTCS work. Research aim Our aim was to describe the care workers’ lived experiences of ethical issues. The findings can be used to gain new perspectives and to guide decision-making to improve the quality of care, occupational well-being and nursing education. Research (...) design Focus group interviews were analyzed using a hermeneutic-phenomenological method. The analysis comprised three steps: naïve reading, structural analysis, and comprehensive understanding. Participants and research context We randomly sampled LTCS service providers in Finland and 53 care workers with different educational backgrounds from seven organizations participated in focus group interviews in 2021. Ethical considerations This was a sensitive study, which was connected to the participants’ individual views of the world, professional ethics and social and health care legislation. The participants' provided informed consent and their anonymity was guaranteed. Findings Care workers spoke about their lived experiences of ethical issues in an emotional way, using practical examples. They talked about how they were experts at caring and advocating for residents, balanced the responsibilities of their different roles, and defended their work to the wider society. The care workers said that ethical aspects of their work were too difficult to solve on their own. There were elements of their working environment and practices that caused unnecessary strain and they needed the commitment of managers, organizations, and society to solve ethical issues in LTCS. Conclusions Ethical issues were related to the well-being of both residents and care workers and reflected both internal and external pressures. Some issues could not be resolved by individuals and needed input from managers, organizations, and society. (shrink)

" _On Friendship_, with its total of one hundred sayings, is the perfect gift for friends."—Feng Yingjing, renowned scholar and civic official, 1601 Matteo Ricci is best known as the Italian Jesuit missionary who brought Christianity to China. He also published a landmark text on friendship—the first book to be written in Chinese by a European—that instantly became a late Ming best seller. _On Friendship_ distilled the best ideas on friendship from Renaissance Latin texts into one hundred pure and provocative (...) Chinese maxims. Written in a masterful classical style, Ricci's sayings established his reputation as a great sage and the sentiments still ring true. Available for the first time in English, _On Friendship_ matches a carefully edited Chinese text with a facing-page English translation and includes notes on sources and biographical, historical, and cultural information. Still admired in China for its sophistication and inspirational wisdom, _On Friendship_ is a delightful cross-cultural work by a crucial and fascinating historical figure. It is also an excellent tool for learning Chinese, pairing a superb model of the classical language with an accessible and accurate translation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the linguistic concept of implicit offensiveness. On the one hand, implicitness will be juxtaposed with indirectness as the two concepts are not conceived of here as synonymous. On the other hand, a typology of offensiveness (vs offensive language and vs offendedness) will be proposed, as well as the overarching term ‘covert meaning’ that will span figurative implicitness and non-figurative implicitness. The gradability of various forms of covert meaning and its (...) overlap with overt meaning (subsuming explicit literal meaning and implicit literal meaning) will also be discussed. In the analysis, two sample implicit concepts will be examined (irony vs sarcasm) based on corpus data (of general English and dedicated offensiveness corpus) and using non-contextual embeddings. Theory-wise, the paper demonstrates that implicitness is a complex term which is fuzzy and gradable; methodology-wise, it shows how computational tools can be used to attest theoretical assumptions related to offensive covert terms. (shrink)

It was thus the combination of observational and experimental approaches that ultimately led to confirmation of the outgrowth theory. The observational method was essential for defining various possible methods of nerve fiber development. The multicellular, protoplasmic bridge and outgrowth theories were each postulated to explain purely observational evidence. However, the lack of truly suitable equipment and techniques to study the developing nervous system made it impossible to agree on a single theory on this basis alone. The experimental method provided a (...) means of choosing between these theories. Without the preceding observations that had led to the formulation of various hypotheses, however, the experimental approach might not have been so successful, for the power of this method is more of selection than of generation.Therefore it is impossible to weigh separately the contributions of the observational and experimental approaches to the question of nerve fiber development. Both were necessary for the ultimate acceptance of the outgrowth theory. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402051 00004. (shrink)

Social consciousness – which amounts to something like ‘being woke’ – is a cognitive sensitivity to social injustices in one’s local environment and broader culture. From here, social consciousness can be accounted for in a variety of ways. Recently, it’s been suggested that we can understand social consciousness through the lens of moral encroachment. To be social consciousness, on this account, is to believe in accordance with the dictates of moral encroachment. After considering this account, I raise a few worries: (...) it involves controversial theoretical commitments, entails unintuitive verdicts in important cases, and appears to be too demanding. In light of these worries, I develop a new account of social consciousness as a morally virtuous cognitive disposition that manifests primarily in certain doxastic states. I argue that we should favor the virtue account because it weathers the worries that trouble the encroachment account, and better captures several important features of social consciousness. (shrink)

The claim that prejudice causes prejudiced beliefs is a familiar one. Call it the causal claim. In this paper, I turn to sexism and sexist beliefs to explore the causal claim within the context of current debates in the ethics of beliefs about moral encroachment on epistemic rationality. My goal is to consider and arbitrate between plausible ways of fleshing out the idea that the non-doxastic dimensions of sexism (including its motivational and affective components as well as its structural and (...) institutional varieties) cause sexist beliefs in a normatively significant way – that is, in a way that can render those beliefs epistemically deficient. I suggest that, in conjunction with the assumption that sexist beliefs are epistemically irrational, each position in the ethics of belief debate lends itself to a different interpretation of the causal claim: purism about epistemic rationality supports a narrow interpretation, while revisionism supports a broad one. After developing each interpretation, I argue that – at the heart of the disagreement between them – is a different story about the normative significance of the fact that evidence about an unfortunate truth has a sexist provenance. Along the way, I consider what it means for evidence to be “stacked in favor” of sexist beliefs. (shrink)

Si la praxéologie mérite aujourd’hui notre attention, c’est parce qu’elle permet de remonter aux origines des « théories de l’action », des sociologies de l’action ou des philosophies de l’action qui ont marqué le xxe siècle. Que veut dire, au fond, étudier l’action, en proposer ensuite une théorie, à visée soit descriptive soit normative? Dans ce qui suit, on va étudier la question en compagnie de Tadeusz Kotarbiński (1886-1981), philosophe analytique, et de Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011), sociologue hétérodoxe. Ce texte défend (...) l’idée selon laquelle parmi les conséquences les plus marquantes du travail de Garfinkel se trouve la démystification de la « théorie de l’action », et que certaines intuitions similaires sont déjà très présentes chez Kotarbiński (dont les travaux sur l’action constituent, selon Garfinkel, un « échec extrêmement important »). La praxéologie chez les deux auteurs n’est pas une discipline, mais une façon de voir la pratique étudiée comme un tout, à l’instar des recherches menées par les théoriciens de la Gestalt. La dimension athéorique de l’étude de l’action humaine proposée ici permet d’espérer qu’un jour, les phénomènes qui nous entourent vont pouvoir être étudiés pour ce qu’ils sont, et non pas pour ce qu’une théorie élégante permet d’en dire. (shrink)

The article replies to the five comments to Political Self-Deception, from the more philosophical and epistemic remarks to the more political and historical ones. In the end, it summarizes the main points of the book as suggested by the discussion with the five comments.

RésuméNotre identité sociale influe sur nos croyances. Mais comment évaluer cet impact doxastique d'un point de vue épistémique? Pour obtenir un portrait fiable de l'importance épistémique de l'identité sociale, nous devons explorer la jonction peu étudiée des influences non pertinentes et de l’épistémologie du point de vue, ce qui nous amène à des cas de double preuve d'ordre supérieur. Le fait d'envisager l'identité sociale sous l'angle des influences non pertinentes nous donne une preuve d'ordre supérieur d'erreur, tandis que l'examen selon (...) l'avantage du point de vue fournit une preuve d'ordre supérieur d'exactitude. Nous devons donc soupeser la force de chaque élément de preuve d'ordre supérieur au cas par cas afin d’évaluer épistémiquement l'impact doxastique de l'identité sociale. (shrink)

Language understanding comes with a particular kind of phenomenology. It is often observed that when listening to utterances in a familiar language, competent language users can have experiences of understanding the meanings of these utterances. The nature of such experiences is a much debated topic. In this paper, I develop a new proposal according to which experiences of understanding are a particular kind of epistemic feelings of fluency that result from evaluative monitoring processes. The perceptual experience that accompanies linguistic comprehension (...) results from the deployment of early stage auditory processes of speech perception that lead to the recognition of words. (shrink)

There are an increasing number of ways to enhance human abilities, characteristics, and performance. In recent years, the ethical debate on enhancement has focused mainly on the ethical evaluation of new enhancement technologies. Yet, the search for an adequate and shared understanding of enhancement has always remained an important part of the debate. It was initially undertaken with the intention of defining the ethical boundaries of enhancement, often by attempting to distinguish enhancements from medical treatments. One of the more recent (...) approaches comes from Julian Savulescu, Anders Sandberg, and Guy Kahane. With their welfarist account, they define enhancement in terms of its contribution to individual well-being: as any state of a person that increases the chances of living a good life in the given set of circumstances. The account aims to contribute both to a shared and clear understanding of enhancement and to answering the question of whether we should enhance in certain ways or not. I will argue that it cannot live up to either claim, in particular because of its inherent normativity and its failure to adequately define well-being. Nevertheless, it can make a valuable contribution to an ethics of enhancement. As I will show, the welfarist account refocuses the debate on a central value in health care: well-being, which can be a relevant aspect in assessing the permissibility of biomedical interventions – especially against the background of new bioethical challenges. To fulfil this function, however, a more differentiated understanding of well-being is needed. (shrink)

Given the central place organisms occupy in Kant’s account of living nature, it might seem unlikely that his claims about biological wholes could be relevant to current debates over the problem of biological individuality. These debates acknowledge the multiple realizability of biological individuality in vastly different forms, including parts of organisms and complex groups of organisms at various levels of the biological hierarchy, sparking much controversy in attempts to characterize a biological individual. I argue that, far from being irrelevant to (...) this controversy, Kant’s account provides a key insight for addressing the multiple realizability problem. I show how the reciprocal causality between a self-organizing whole and its parts, which Kant thinks characterizes a natural end, is not limited to organisms but is exhibited by numerous types of beings in living nature. Self-organizing wholes of various kinds, and at various biological levels, may count as biological individuals, depending on the degree to which their functionally integrated parts are represented by reflective judgement as a natural end. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Epic and Tragic Music: The Union of the Arts in the Eighteenth CenturyJoshua BillingsI. The Union of the Arts in WeimarAround 1800 in Weimar, thought on Greek tragedy crystallized around the union of speech, music, and gesture—what Wagner would later call the Gesamtkunstwerk. Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottfried Herder both found something lacking in modern spoken theater in comparison with ancient tragedy’s synthesis of the arts. Schiller’s 1803 “Trauerspiel (...) mit Chören,” Die Braut von Messina, represents a radical experiment in recreating the ancient union of the arts.1 The Greek tragic chorus, revived in Schiller’s drama, becomes the modern locus for this union. In a preface appended to the published version of the play, Schiller writes,The tragic work of poetry first becomes a whole through its theatrical performance: the poet only gives the words; music and dance must be added as well to enliven them. As long as the chorus lacks this powerful sensory accompaniment, so long will it appear in the economy of a tragedy as an alien element, a foreign body, a retardation.2 [End Page 99]Exactly contemporary (and possibly in response), Herder’s discussion of drama in his journal Adrastea similarly views the union of the arts in ancient tragedy as a corrective for modern drama:3A Greek who attended our tragedy [Trauerspiel], used to the musical voice of his own, would have to find in it a sad play [trauriges Spiel]. “How wordy-mute,” he would say, “how dull and soundless! Have I stepped into a decorated grave? You shout and sigh and bluster! Move your arms, strain your facial features, reason, declaim; but does your voice and feeling never become song? Do you not miss the strength of this demonic expression? Do your rhythms, your iambs never urge you on to the accents of the true language of the gods?”4The focus on media distinguishes these Weimar discussions of tragedy both from the Jena aesthetics of the Schlegel brothers and from the Idealist “philosophy of the tragic” already underway in the works of Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel.5 Though both Schiller and Herder are relatively indifferent to dance, their writings reflect strong interests in music.6 Their considerations [End Page 100] of tragedy show a close engagement with the sensory experience of drama that is unusual for its time, and has little precedent in Germany.For Schiller’s late poetics, the union of words, music, and gesture is a means of radically dividing the experience of theater from daily life. The tragic chorus “should be for us a living wall, which tragedy sets up around itself in order to close itself off wholly from the real world.”7 It “justifies the tragic poet in this raising of tone, which fills the ear, which strains the spirit, which broadens the whole mind.”8 Musical speech, Schiller argues, allows for an expression that transcends conventional language and quotidian existence. Schiller had hoped “to let [the choral intermezzos] be recited in the way of song and to accompany them with an instrument,” though his wish went unfulfilled in the first, and subsequent performances.9 Yet even after relinquishing the real possibility of a union of the arts in performances of Braut, Schiller upheld it as an ideal in his preface.Herder is remembered today primarily for his elaboration of an organic historicism, which understands cultural phenomena according to the circumstances of their creation. Yet his concern was more than merely historical; especially in the Adrastea, he continually sought guidance for the present in the events of the past. A contemporary, writing shortly after Herder’s death, saw the two orientations, historical and critical, as equally important: investigation of the past was intended as “a didactic or warning image” for his own time.10 The guiding idea of the journal was similarly educative, based on Herder’s understanding of Adrastea as a principle of justice and moderation.11 In Herder’s thought, as in most writing on ancient literature of the eighteenth century, there is no absolute division between scholarly and critical concerns: the study of ancient works was both an end in itself and a... (shrink)

The Genetic Privacy Act is a comprehensive effort to protect individuals from unauthorized analysis of their DNA and from unauthorized disclosure of information resulting from genetic analysis. Irrespective of merit, every bill must survive legislative scrutiny. This is a considerable challenge, particularly for a bill as complex and far-reaching as the GPA. To illustrate my point, I describe the fate of two bills introduced into the Maryland Senate in 1995 by Senator Jennie Forehand. The first, also entitled the Genetic Privacy (...) Act, was a slightly modified version of the model legislation prepared by Annas, Glantz, and Roche. After a hearing, the bill received a 9-2 unfavorable vote from the Economic and Environmental Affairs Committee. The second was a much shorter bill, DNA Testing – Informed Consent and Confidentiality, which simply stated that “DNA analysis may only be performed with the informed consent of the person being analyzed” and that the results of such analysis “are the exclusive property of the person tested, are confidential, and may not be disclosed without the consent of the person being tested.” This bill had a hearing but was never put to a vote by the Judicial Proceedings Committee. My principal aim is to examine the testimony on these bills. I will conclude with some suggestions about accomplishing the goals of genetic privacy legislation. (shrink)

The paper aimed to reconstruct Twardowski's approach to the problem of free will and his analyses of the consequences of various solutions to this problem in ethics and criminal law. According to Twardowski, if we understand ‘free will’ as the possibility of making resolutions other than actually made, then (most probably) nobody has free will. Our resolutions are determined by a set of mental dispositions (character) and incentives that activate these dispositions. However, the existence of freedom of will such understood (...) is not a necessary condition for the correct functioning of ethical systems or criminal law. On the contrary, ethical systems and criminal law seem to assume that at least some of our resolutions are determined by our relatively stable dispositions. Only then can these resolutions and the actions that follow them be ascribed to certain agents. Twardowski's views on free will are presented here in the context of the metaphilosophical positions of the Lvov–Warsaw School, the central European branch of analytic philosophy. His position is also juxtaposed with Brentano's view of free will and Łukasiewicz's approach to the determinism/indeterminism debate. This juxtaposition illustrates the variety of philosophical positions and the diversity of the metaphilosophical toolkit applied in early analytic philosophy. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. The article is devoted to the analysis of the key directions of the study of the possible influence of the specifics of Chinese language culture on the content and nature of intellectual discourse, which is recognized as philosophical. Logic and ontology are the key areas of analysis of the possible influence of linguistic determinants on the intellectual discourse of China. Three main topics that attract the attention of researchers are the (...) structure of judgment, the semantics of lexical units, and the specificity of the pragmatics of the Chinese language. M e t h o d s. The author applied general scientific methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison and description of the works of researchers of Chinese philosophy, which justify and argue the fruitfulness of studying the peculiarities of Chinese language to explain the reasons of the fundamental difference between the problems actualized in the history of Chinese philosophy and those that formed the basis of the development of the history of philosophy in the Western world. R e s u l t s. It is generally accepted that for the worldview of representatives of Chinese culture, the world is a structural whole, consisting of elements that continuously interact in the dynamics of changes and transformations, we find a reflection of this feature in the semantics of the corresponding symbolic system. Polysemy in the Chinese language mostly reveals a complex and multi-layered "web" of associative and correlative connections between meanings, which in fact cannot be argued outside the context of the relevant cultural tradition indicating common features or similarities of the signified. The doubt about the typicality of understanding the denotations as fixed and atomized for the Chinese language culture is reasonable, even in those cases when it comes to the designation of empirically accessible objectivity. The main specific features of polysemy in the Chinese language are the complete heterogeneity of what is signified, and the lack of transparent grounds for identifying the genus-species subordination of the scope of general concepts. This can also serve as an explanation for the fact that we do not find a completely obvious and nondisputable analogue of the problem of universals of the Western model in the history of Chinese philosophy. C o n c l u s i o n s. Based on the peculiarities of the Chinese language culture, we can recognize as a reasonable a statement that the seemingly natural understanding of the essence – the subject, as something that remains the same (at least for a certain time), but it undergoes some changes through its manifestations – a predicate (properties and actions). It is not as necessary and axiomatic for Chinese thinkers as, for example, for ancient Greek philosophers. In addition, we can recognize the fact that the verb "to exist" does not fulfill the role of a necessary copula in judgments in the Chinese language, as a probable reason for the lack of fundamental problematization of the concept of "being" in the Chinese history of philosophy. In general, the context of the use of a certain word-sign in the Chinese language plays a determining role. The actualization of one or another meaning in an expression is formed not only by its integration into a certain text, but also by its purpose in accordance with the specific practice of application. Therefore, this can serve as an explanation for the absence of an original and axiomatic interpretation of truth as absolute, that is, unchanging and non-relative in the history of Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

This study of the Sicilian Questions of the philosopher and mystic Ibn Sabٴ īn of Murcia interprets the structure and sources of the text as a reflection of intellectual life in the late Almohad Arab West.