Patient safety has assumed a prominent role on the policy agenda since the Institute of Medicine report To Err Is Human was released in November 1999. The report maintained that medical error is the predominant mechanism by which patients in the United States and around the world are injured. This finding, along with the report’s recommendation for a “systems” approach to reducing medical error, provided an extremely important insight into the operation of our medical delivery system. Clearly, while advances in (...) medical technology, diagnostic techniques, and knowledge provide the foundation for saving lives, medical error has resulted in their loss. However, recognition that medical error is a primary cause of these avoidable patient injuries and deaths is a key one and may result in improvements within our system of health-care delivery as well as minimization of the emotional and financial toll that iatrogenic injury causes. (shrink)

Presents philosophers and their views from before Socrates to the present and explores possibilities for the future.

The idea of ‘community’ dominates politics in Northern Ireland in both popular and political discourse and in academic writing, policy and legislation. Depending upon particular understandings of the notion of community different arguments are made about the policies that need to be implemented to develop the peace process. This has had a fundamental impact on areas such as legislation over parades and the development of a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland. This essay critically looks at understandings of ‘community’; how (...) it becomes used in political discourse and in policy development and the character of its relationship with ideas about safety and security. (shrink)

Neoliberalism’s relationship to New Public Management is well known but less is understood of how these ideas have become embedded in the state. This article explores one dimension of ‘how the state ‘changes its mind’ by exploring the ideological and cultural transformation within the senior management ranks of Canada’s largest provincial state, Ontario. A broadly Gramscian framework is used to develop greater insight into the process of cultural change within the state and the specific role of senior managers as the (...) ‘organic intellectuals’ of the neoliberal revolution. (shrink)

本书从界定证据相关性的内涵入手,分别探讨了逻辑上的相关性和法律上的相关性,从而澄清了一些在借鉴英美国家证据规则时出现的概念混淆。.

While the linguistic influence of India’s indigenous languages on the Indo- Aryan language is well understood, the cultural impact of the autochthonous Munda, Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman speaking peoples is much harder to evaluate, due to the lack of indigenous coeval records, and later historicization of the Buddha’s life and teachings. Nevertheless, there are cultural remnants of the indigenous belief systems discoverable in the Buddhist scriptures. In this article we examine 1) The longstanding hostility between the IA immigrants and the eastern (...) ethnic groups, especially the Buddha’s Sakya clan. 2) The Sakyas’ socio-political organization, religious and cultural values which differ significantly from those of the immigrants. 3) The concept of the Mah?puru?a which was likely an historicization of an indigenous Indian belief. 4) Indigenous belief structures like serpent- and tree-worship and the culture of sacred groves, and 5) Indigenous funeral rites in the story of the Buddha’s parinibb?na. (shrink)

A global transformation of modes of religious authority has been taking place at an increasing pace in recent years. The social and political implications of the growing dominance of neo-scripturalist discourses on Islam have been particularly noticeable after 11 September 2001. This evolution of religiosity, which is mediated by mass media and new media technology, creates the conditions of existence of a post-Weberian and post-Durkheimian order. In this new social context, legitimacy (and legitimate violence) can be more easily disconnected from (...) the institutionalized framework of religious and political authority. Both in Muslim countries and in Western democracies, the attempt by Islamic activists to make the Shari’a relevant in contemporary settings creates new opportunities and challenges for legal pluralism. At the same time, the multiplication of Muslim voices claiming to be able to interpret the sacred texts, particularly in virtual communities, creates an increasingly inchoate ‘noise’ about Islamic orthodoxy. In the context of an exponential increase in the global possibilities for religious identification and expression, the growth of neo-scripturalist interpretations of Islam reflects a quest for parsimony and stability. (shrink)

Since the early modern period, the vast majority of philosophers who have written on contempt have understood it as a denial of respect. But there has been considerable disagreement about precisely what kind of respect we deny people when we contemn them. Contemporary philosophers who defend contempt as a morally appropriate attitude tend to understand it as a denial of what Stephen Darwall calls appraisal respect, while early modern writers, who all believe that contemning others constitutes a serious moral wrong, (...) seem to understand it more as a denial of recognition respect. In this paper, I argue that neither of these understandings of contempt hits the mark and that we do better to conceptualize it as a denial of recognition in the sense articulated by Axel Honneth and by other critical theorists who have been influenced by his work. (shrink)

A brief account of the work of Giorgio Agamben and its relation to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.

According to Stephen Darwall, being with others involves an implicit, second-personal respect for them. I argue that this is correct as far as it goes. Calling on Jean-Luc Nancy’s more ontological account of being-with, though, I also argue that Darwall’s account overlooks something morally very important: right at the heart of the being-with that gives us to ourselves as answerable to others on the basis of determinate, contractualist moral principles, we encounter an irreducible excess of sense that renders those principles (...) questionable. Following Nancy, I characterize this exposure to excess as adoration and develop some of its moral implications. (shrink)

In the early modern period, contempt emerged as a persistent theme in moral philosophy. Most of the moral philosophers of the period shared two basic commitments in their thinking about contempt. First, they argued that we understand the value of others in the morally appropriate way when we understand them from the perspective of the morally relevant community. And second, they argued that we are naturally inclined to judge others as contemptible, and that we must therefore interrupt that natural movement (...) of sense-bestowal in order to value others in the morally appropriate way. In this paper I examine in detail the arguments of Nicolas Malebranche and Immanuel Kant concerning the wrongness of contempt, emphasizing the ways in which they depend on conceptions of community and of the interruption of moral sense-bestowal. After showing how each of these arguments fails to comprehend the nature and the wrongness of contempt, I argue that we can find the resources for a more adequate account in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and specifically in his reflections on ontology and on the meaning of community. (shrink)

A primary aim of mind-wandering research has been to understand its influence on task performance. While this research has typically highlighted the costs of mind wandering, a handful of studies have suggested that mind wandering may be beneficial in certain situations. Perhaps the most-touted benefit is that mind wandering during a creative-incubation interval facilitates creative thinking. This finding has played a critical role in the development of accounts of the adaptive value of mind wandering and its functional role, as well (...) as potential mechanisms of mind wandering. Thus, a demonstration of the replicability of this important finding is warranted. Here, we attempted to conceptually replicate results of a highly cited laboratory-based experiment supporting this finding. However, across two studies (N = 443), we found no evidence for the claim that mind wandering during a creative-incubation interval facilitates a form of creativity associated with divergent thinking. We suggest that our failed conceptual replication stems from an inadequate characterization of mind wandering (task-unrelated thought), and that there are good reasons to think that task-unrelated thought is unlikely to be causally related to creativity. Our results cast doubt on the claim that task-unrelated thought during an incubation interval enhances divergent creativity while also offering some prescriptions for how future research might further elucidate the cognitive benefits of mind wandering. (shrink)

The concept of generation has had little refinement and application in recent sociology. After reviewing the literature, this article modifies Mannheim's original conceptualization through Bourdieu's notion of habitus, with the aim of providing a framework for the comparative study of generations. To this end, generation is defined as a cohort of persons passing through time who come to share a common habitus, hexis and culture, a function of which is to provide them with a collective memory that serves to integrate (...) the cohort over a finite period of time. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides a compelling account of alterity in The Prose of the World. I begin by tracing this account of alterity back to its roots in Phenomenology of Perception. I then show how the dynamic of expression articulated in The Prose of the World overcomes the limitations of the account given in the earlier work. After addressing an objection to the effect that the account given in The Prose of the World fails for (...) the same reason as the one given in Phenomenology of Perception, I argue that the key to Merleau-Ponty’s more successful account of alterity is provided by the phenomenon of orientation. (shrink)

In the present paper, we endow semi De Morgan logic and a family of its axiomatic extensions with proper multi-type display calculi which are sound, complete, conservative, and enjoy cut elimination and subformula property. Our proposal builds on an algebraic analysis of the variety of semi De Morgan algebras, and applies the guidelines of the multi-type methodology in the design of display calculi.

I argue in this paper that Immanuel Kant's account of the moral wrongness of contempt in the Metaphysics of Morals provides important resources for our understanding of the nature of moral subjectivity. Although Kant typically emphasizes the subject's position as autonomous addressor of the moral law, his remarks on contempt bring into relief a dynamic relationship at the heart of practical subjectivity between the addressor and addressee positions. After tracing the development of reflection concerning the addressor and addressee positions in (...) early modern philosophy, beginning with Francisco Suarez and Samuel Pufendorf, I articulate and defend what I take to be a Kantian conception of the relation between those positions. More specifically, I argue that to be a moral subject at all is necessarily to position oneself as the addressor of the moral law, but that one must at the same time maintain oneself in the addressee position, resisting the full conversion to the addressor position that autonomy seems to demand. (shrink)

According to Immanuel Kant, the objective validity of obligation is given as a fact of reason, which forces itself upon us and which requires no deduction of the kind that he had provided for the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason. This fact grounds a moral philosophy that treats obligation as a good that trumps all others and that presents the moral subject as radically responsible, singled out by an imperatival address. Based on conceptions of indifference and facticity that (...) Charles Scott has articulated in his recent work, I argue that these broadly Kantian commitments are mistaken. More specifically, I argue that the fact of obligation is given along with a dimension of indifference that disrupts the hierarchical relation between moral and non-moral goods and that renders questionable the unconditional character of responsibility. (shrink)

Aristotle claims that human beings are by nature political animals. We might think there is a way for non-Aristotelians to affirm something like this—that human beings are political, though not by nature in the Aristotelian sense. It is not clear, however, precisely what this amounts to. In this paper, I try to explain what the claim that human beings are political animals might mean. I also consider what it would it look like to defend this claim, which I call the (...) normative political animal thesis. I argue that this thesis cannot be given a general defense. Successful arguments for the normative political animal thesis must be made within particular ethical frameworks. To illustrate what such an argument might look like, I sketch a defense of the normative political animal thesis within a roughly Lockean rights theory, where its adoption seems especially promising. (shrink)

本书试图从实践哲学的立场,沿着教育学史的脉络和知识分类的框架,重新考察教育中理论与实践的关系.

The essential guide to the history of western philosophy.

Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is often characterised in terms of competitive individuals debating orally with one another in public arenas. But it also developed over its long history a sense in which philosophers might acknowledge some other particular philosopher or group of philosophers as an authority and offer to that authority explicit intellectual allegiance. This is most obvious in the development after the classical period of the philosophical 'schools' with agreed founders and, most importantly, canonical founding texts. There also (...) developed a tradition of commentary, interpretation, and discussion of texts which itself became a mode of philosophical debate. As time went on, the weight of a growing tradition of reading and appealing to a certain corpus of foundational texts began to shape how later antiquity viewed its philosophical past and also how philosophical debate and inquiry was conducted. In this book leading scholars explore aspects of these important developments. (shrink)

Body-politic metaphors served historically as figurative vehicles to transmit assorted socio-political messages. Through an examination of the metaphors la mollesse and Adam Smith’s impartial spectator, this article will show that the language of eighteenth-century French and British writers was not simply heuristic or metaphorical. Contemporaries reacted to the growth of commerce and luxury, and the concomitant creation of new public spaces and forms of social interaction, by arguing that the corporeal mediated the social. I want to introduce the concept of (...) corporeal sociability: cognitive physiology and the network of the senses, contemporaries argued, contained the information necessary to assess novel forms of commerce and revealed that sociability was congenitally embodied. (shrink)

Despite the vital part played by teachers in education and schooling, the role, work and status of teachers, including their preparation and continuing professional development, remain in a conditi...

This paper considers the way in which Christian Religious Education (RE) teachers articulate the difficulties and challenges they experience both in school and with their peers as they navigate their way through their Initial Teacher Education. The paper offers a unique exploration of the relationship between elements of the three discourses of faith identity, emerging professional identity and the requirements of a performative teacher training context. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 184 student RE teachers across three universities. It became clear (...) that all students interpreted the Standards and policy guidelines ambiguously, as being value-laden or value-free. The idea of the 'good teacher' as someone who was, by very definition, neutral and objective immediately made the faith position of students problematic. This is a key point in relation to the notion of performativity and education and the disproportionate impact it made on Christian students. It appeared as though many Christian students were concerned to stress that although their faith was personally important for them it was not something that contributed to their understanding of a 'good teacher'. (shrink)

In any field it is common practice for an editor who is sent a book for review to put it into the hands of a reviewer who has published a book on the same subject. The reasons are self—vident: not only does the reviewer have specialist knowledge, he is known by the journal's readers to have it, and is likely therefore to be accepted by them as an authority. However, there are arguments against the practice which, though less often considered, (...) deserve to carry the day more often than they do. The mere fact that the new author has written his bookat all means or ought to mean, that he thinks existing books on the subject leave something to be desiredhypenif he has nothing new to say he should have kept silent. But this in turn means that his book is in conflict with or goes beyond, what his reviewer has published on the same subject, and in that sense contains implicit criticism of the reviewer's work. It is this fact that creates the problem. For if the reviewer lets such elements in the book pass he will appear to readers who know his own work to be either conceding arguments or condoning what he ought to regard as error, while if he praises them he may appear to be recanting his own positions. In the circumstances what he tends to do is come down heavily on those aspects of the book that differ from his own, and criticize them. Thus it comes about that the sub-text of many a hostile review is less an impartial assessment of the author's work than an oblique defence of the reviewer's. To say this is not to impute bad motives to the reviewer: on the contrary, my point is that it is in the logic of the situation. (shrink)