Amid increasing demands from students and the public, universities have recently reinvigorated their efforts to increase the number of faculty from underrepresented populations. Although a myriad of piecemeal programs targeting individual recruitment and development have been piloted at several institutions, overall growth in faculty diversity remains almost negligible and highly localized. To bring about genuine change, we hypothesize a consortia approach that links individuals to hiring opportunities within a state university system might be more effective. Here we present a case (...) study describing the progress of the NSF-funded Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate PROMISE Academy Alliance, a consortium within the University System of Maryland collaborating to develop, implement, self-study, evaluate, and disseminate a unique postdoc-to-faculty conversion model in the biomedical sciences. The initiative centers on diversifying faculty across five institutions in the USM, including teaching-focused institutions, comprehensive universities, research institutions, and professional schools. Components of this approach include enhanced recruiting and hiring practices to attract outstanding postdoctoral scholars from underrepresented backgrounds, multi-institutional networking and professional development, and facilitated processes to transition postdocs into tenure-track positions at their postdoctoral institution or another institution in the state system. This model is distinct from more deficit-based approaches because it goes beyond focusing on building the individual’s skills to enter the professoriate. This program restructures the traditionally short-term nature of postdoctoral employment and incorporates a pathway to a tenure-track professorship at the same institution or within the same statewide system where the postdoc is trained. This multi-institutional model leverages collaboration and distinct institutional strengths to create cross-institutional support, advocacy, and policy. Importantly, it uses a decentralized financial structure that makes this approach distinctly replicable. Recognizing the immediate need for more collaborative approaches to diversify faculty and a lack of literature about such approaches, this case study describes the development of, and potential benefits of, a state university system, as well as the qualitative lessons learned from self-study, internal evaluation, external evaluation, and NSF site visits. The AGEP PROMISE Academy can serve as a model for replication at other university systems hoping to diversify their faculty. (shrink)

Half of the 33.2 million people living with HIV today are women. Yet, responses to the epidemic are not adequately meeting the needs of women. This article critically evaluates how prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) programs, the principal framework under which women's health is currently addressed in the global response to AIDS, have tended to focus on the prevention of HIV transmission from HIV-positive women to their infants. This paper concludes that more than ten years after their inception, PMTCT programs (...) still do not successfully ensure the adequate treatment, care and support of HIV-infected women. Of particular concern is the continued widespread use of single-dose nevirapine despite World Health Organization recommendations to employ more effective combination therapies that do not potentially jeopardize women's future treatment outcomes. In response, the article calls for a more comprehensive approach that places women's health needs at the centre of AIDS responses. This is critical in settings where the pandemic is generalized and there is a push to greatly expand PMTCT programs, as a more effective and equitable way of meeting the needs of women in the context of HIV. Without such a comprehensive approach, women will continue to be impacted disproportionately by the pandemic, and current strategies for prevention, including PMTCT, and treatment will not be as effective and responsive as they need to be. (shrink)

WREI's acclaimed biennial series examines the current state of women and leadership.

The eight essays contained in this book explore the portrayal of women, and various philosophical responses to that portrayal in contemporary post-civil rights society. They bring feminist voices to the conversation about gender and attests to the importance of feminist critique in what is sometimes claimed to be a post-feminist era.

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

Interoception can be broadly defined as the sense of signals originating within the body. As such, interoception is critical for our sense of embodiment, motivation, and well-being. And yet, despite its importance, interoception remains poorly understood within modern science. This paper reviews interdisciplinary perspectives on interoception, with the goal of presenting a unified perspective from diverse fields such as neuroscience, clinical practice, and contemplative studies. It is hoped that this integrative effort will advance our understanding of how interoception determines well-being, (...) and identify the central challenges to such understanding. To this end, we introduce an expanded taxonomy of interoceptive processes, arguing that many of these processes can be understood through an emerging predictive coding model for mind–body integration. The model, which describes the tension between expected and felt body sensation, parallels contemplative theories, and implicates interoception in a variety of affective and psychosomatic disorders. We conclude that maladaptive construal of bodily sensations may lie at the heart of many contemporary maladies, and that contemplative practices may attenuate these interpretative biases, restoring a person’s sense of presence and agency in the world. (shrink)

The contribution of this book to the field of reconciliation is both theoretical and practical, recognizing that good theory guides effective practice and practice is the ground for compelling theory. Using a Girardian hermeneutic as a starting point, a new conceptual Gestalt emerges in these essays, one not fully integrated in a formal way but showing a clear understanding of some of the challenges and possibilities for dealing with the deep divisions, enmity, hatred, and other effects of violence.

In the current study we compared academic locus of control (ALoC) and perceived quality of academic life (PQAL) across three groups of university students: those without disabilities, those with attention deficit disorder or learning disabilities (ADD-LD), and those with other disabilities. Results showed no significant differences in ALoC scores, with each group reporting an internal ALoC. However, students with other disabilities (e.g., sensory, motor, chronic health, and/or mental health) reported significantly lower satisfaction with their overall quality of academic life than (...) students without disabilities. Applied implications are discussed along with recommendations for further research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wild LoveCynthia Willett’s Biosocial Eros EthicsAnn V. MurphyI’ll frame my comments in honor of Cynthia Willett’s work in light of two recent anecdotes:Anecdote I: It happened that one evening as I was reading Willett’s most recent monograph Interspecies Ethics—in particular the chapter on animals’ capacity for laughter and humor—my wonderful (if somewhat insubordinate) Airedale terrier, Nora Mae Murphy, heard me laughing, trotted into the living room, jumped on (...) the couch, looked at me with concern, stared down at the book in my hand, then placed her paw on my arm as if to check my pulse, eyes wide and ears slicked back. Nora is used to me reading philosophy at night; but she is not used to me laughing loudly while doing so. Clearly, she was curious. I smiled in recognition of what Nora’s behavior had enabled me to realize: I don’t often laugh when I read philosophy, not like I did that night while reading Willett’s work.Anecdote II: Cindy came out to New Mexico last spring to give the keynote address at our department’s annual graduate student conference. The afternoon she arrived, a few graduate students had arranged to take her on a hike in a nature preserve, a beautiful tract of land alongside the Rio Grande, which winds through Albuquerque. The next day, two of [End Page 50] the graduate students were in my office and I asked how the hike went. The students looked at each other, shuffled a bit, and stared at the floor until one announced, “Well, we kind of got locked in the preserve.” Me: “You got locked in the nature preserve?” “Yep, but it all worked out okay. She was cool with it,” one student reported. The other added: “Yeah, she’s pretty wild.”That conversation happened months before I was asked to speak on and to Willett’s work, but that conversation, that compliment, that word—“wild”—came to mind many times as I was preparing these comments in her honor. And I mean “wild” in the best sense: as rowdy and irreverent and joyful. There is a wildness to Willett’s texts in their performative aspect, one that marks them as singular. Bucking certain philosophical tendencies to overindulge a metaphorics of war and violence, Willett’s own work evinces an entirely different philosophical orientation, one that takes love, and more specifically eros, as its bedrock. The wildness of Willett’s ethical philosophy comes into play in the truly variable scenes in which Willett locates eros and its promise. It’s a wild kind of love that informs Willett’s ethics, one that refuses domestication, refuses to be hemmed in by the borders between species, refuses to be fixed. The scope that Willett assigns eros is broad, countering the tendency to reduce it to the sexualized and sentimental contexts in which it is often placed.1At the heart of Willett’s deliberations across her four monographs and many articles is an abiding concern with, and celebration of, eros as a site of social, political, and ethical promise. A preoccupation with eros is evident in her work from the very beginning. In her first monograph, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (1995), Willett frames her project in reference to Audre Lorde’s claim (in Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”) that European American culture has perpetuated an understanding of power that parses the erotic from the spiritual and political and as a consequence has “suppressed the deepest source of power and knowledge in our lives” (Lorde 1984, 55, cited in Willett 1995, 7). This first book suggests new conceptions of freedom and ethical subjectivity based on social eroticism, a project furthered in her second monograph The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (2001), where hubris is understood with and against the Greeks as an assault on this primary sociality. “In response to the Greeks we might say that the person is born, not of honor, but of love. Sociality, or social eros, and not honor is the origin and the goal of the person and the positive core of freedom... (shrink)

Between the Psyche and the Social is the first collection that specifically features the field of psychoanalytic social theory emerging in and between psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and across the disciplines of philosophy, literary, film, and cultural studies. This collection of essays takes the psychoanalytic study of social oppression in some new directions by engaging—indeed, stirring up—unconscious fantasies and ethical tensions at the heart of social subjectivity.

Tiberius' speech at the outset of the trial of Cn. Calpurnius Piso, as Tacitus reports it at Annals 3.12, sheds light on two discrepancies between relatio and response in the recently published senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre.

The contribution of this book to the field of reconciliation is both theoretical and practical, recognizing that good theory guides effective practice and practice is the ground for compelling theory. Using a Girardian hermeneutic as a starting point, a new conceptual Gestalt emerges in these essays, one not fully integrated in a formal way but showing a clear understanding of some of the challenges and possibilities for dealing with the deep divisions, enmity, hatred, and other effects of violence. By situating (...) discourse about reconciliation within the context of Girardian thought, it becomes clear that like Peter who vowed he would never deny Jesus but ended up doing it three times any of us is susceptible to the siren call of angry resentment and retaliation. It is with a profound awareness of the power of violence that the emergence of mimetic discourse around reconciliation takes on particular urgency.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics for a Layered SelfLaughter, Reciprocity, Generosity, HomeCynthia WillettI can imagine no better way to respond to these insightful readings than to turn the spotlight on the important books that Ann Murphy and Megan Craig have written on affect and ethics! Craig’s book, Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology, weaves radical empiricism into phenomenology as only a philosopher who is also an artist could. Her evocative queries on (...) prereflective affects, perception, and ethical attunement shed light on the role of moods for unsettling rigid ego boundaries, ethical subjectivity, the feeling of being alive, the audible dimension of ethical encounters, life beyond a struggle to survive, temporality, and ethical ambiguity. These themes are compelling for any postmoral ethics that operates beyond or below the register of modern moral theory’s abstract laws and transparent cogitos. Her work balances an ethical concern for vulnerability with a vital regard for the vibrancy of living creatures and landscapes.Ann Murphy’s Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary illuminates philosophical questions with an abiding lucidity that does not weaken but amplifies the complexity and difficulty of ethics. Murphy’s work exposes how tropes of violence saturate philosophical discourses of both identity formation and of political and historical transformation, and how this violence, embedded in norms, denies sympathetic concern to those outside the limits of cultural intelligibility. Building upon recent work by Judith Butler, Adriana Caverero, and others, Murphy addresses the ambiguities arising from the multiple responses that exposure to vulnerability provokes. These responses can signal care but [End Page 70] they can also manifest violence. Even as she acknowledges the complex underside of cultural intelligibility, Murphy affirms sympathy and generous concern as paradigmatic virtues to be cultivated in response to various forms of violence. She probes the significance of shame and guilt for collective responsibility, ever alert to alterity and difference. With attentive care to the singular contributions of a broad range of philosophers and critical traditions, she argues compellingly for a corporeal ethics grounded on the ontological fact of vulnerability.Through their work, Murphy and Craig pose astute questions for my project, and, in fact, for any endeavor to conceptualize an ethics attentive to an embodied sociality. I describe the multifaceted approach I contribute toward this task as a call and response ethics for a layered self. Craig wonders if the more basic feature before any “call” is contact, touch, or immersion. She notes my concern that “any purported gap or abyss between humans and animals has less to do with unique human capacities than with the rise of urban centers and the loss of contact with other species.” Harm arises from a loss of contact. This is so true. Ethics as contact calls attention to the poetry of proximity, to erotic waves that transmit through the sound or feel of the other’s breath, the heat of the body, and the smell of the skin. This intense proximity serves as a compelling source for ethical sociality, resonating in some respects with what Merleau-Ponty explores as the sense of flesh and touch and, as Murphy suggests, a transcendental eros. This contact is as primal and ordinary as the skin-to-skin contact of caregiver and infant or, perhaps, the skin-to-hair contact of a terrier and her human companion, lost for a moment in inexplicable laughter. From these observations, Craig asks if “call and response” as a locution or central designation adequately captures the intimacy and intensity of these engagements.Craig’s remarks raise the further question of what is at stake in designations or phrasings. An ethics of call and response, designated as such, emerges from phenomenological but also crucially Africana and critical theory traditions. As a relational ethics, this ethics of call and response highlights social relations and expectations, opening a path outside of what Murphy characterizes as the trifecta of virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism. It attends to desire (eros) beneath, in between, and above the prescriptive rules of moral reason or the interests of individuals. At its center are social bonds (friendship and companionship, community and domination, love, hate, and other social emotions, belonging and alienation, and the conflicts of groups and reconciliation) rather... (shrink)

Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most renowned film directors of recent years. Talk to Her is one of the most discussed and controversial of all his films. Dealing principally with the issue of rape, it also offers profound insights into the nature of love and friendship whilst raising important philosophical and moral questions in unsettling and often paradoxical ways. This is the first book to explore and address the philosophical aspects of Almodóvar’s film. Opening with a helpful introduction by (...) Noël Carroll that places the film in context, specially commissioned chapters examine the following topics: The relationship between art and morality and the problem of 'immoralism' Moral injury and its role in the way we form moral judgments, including the ethics of love and friendship The nature of dialogue, sexual objectification and what 'listening to' means in the context of gender Almodóvar's use of allusion and the unmasking of appearances to explore hidden themes in human nature. Including a biography of Almodóvar, Talk to Her is essential reading for students interested in philosophy and film as well as ethics and gender. It is also provides an accessible and informative insight into philosophy for those in related disciplines such as film studies, literature and religion. Contributors: Noël Carroll, A. W. Eaton, Cynthia Freeland, Robert B. Pippin, C.D.C. Reeve, and George M. Wilson. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Family in Greek HistoryCheryl Anne CoxCynthia B. Patterson. The Family in Greek History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 286 pp. 6 figs. Cloth, $35.The purpose of Cynthia Patterson's book is to view family structures and family interests and ideals in the historical development of the Greek polis. In her study she takes us through nineteenth-century scholarship, the worlds of Homer and Hesiod, and the societies (...) of Sparta, Gortyn, and Athens as well.In chapter 1, "The Nineteenth-Century Paradigm of Greek Family History," she explores how Bachofen, Fustel de Coulanges, Henry Maine, Louis Morgan, and Friedrich Engels theorized that matriarchy gave way to patriarchy, patrilineality, and agnation. In this context monogamy was the instrument of the patriarchal state, which subjugated women and forced them into the private sphere of the household. This paradigm saw its way into the studies of Grote, whose political history overlooked the contributions of women in Greece; and into those of Mahaffy, who emphasized the social inferiority of women. It is a paradigm that has also influenced, in the twentieth century, the seminal studies on the Greek family by Lacey and Pomeroy. Needless to say, Patterson attempts to dispel this paradigm.In chapter 2, "The Family in Homer and Hesiod," she emphasizes that there is no evidence of patrilineal clans in Homeric society. Public interest, rather, centered on marriage and the oikos, the individual household. In Hesiod the corporate clan was not heir to a man's possessions, and there is little attention given to lineage and ancestors.In chapter 3, "Early Greek Law and the Family," Patterson looks at early law in Sparta, Gortyn, and Athens. For Sparta, she concludes that Spartan marriages [End Page 153] were the result of traditional household strategy, that is, property devolving to legitimate children. For Gortyn, the household was the center of social and economic order. There is no evidence of evolution from a clan-based society to one of private property. For pre-Solonian Athens, again there is no evidence of clans, while the extended kin group of Athens, the anchisteia, was nonagnatic. Solon restricted the bastard, or nothos, from the household, a move which brought the oikos into clearer focus. Patterson ends her discussion by stating that the public interest in securing a husband for an heiress was articulated through the anchisteia.In chapter 4, "Marriage and Adultery in Democratic Athens," she turns her attention to how the polis was interested in the effects of adultery, or moicheia, on the household. She insists that although there was no formal definition of marriage, and although there were no certificates or registers, marriage was not vague because it was recognized through communally witnessed rituals. If marriage can be seen to have been a social process, we may dispel the widespread notion that it was vague. (On the other hand, I would counter, if we view marriage as social process, then during that process witnesses die or are called liars; marriage can come under attack.) Adultery received the public interest, she continues, because it was a violation of the women of the household--here clearly supporting the traditional definition of moicheia as pertaining to a man's kinswomen, not just his wife. This interconnection between household and polis is reflected by Plato's Laws, in which the state tries to reconcile its interest in the household with its concern for unruly passions.With chapter 5, "Adultery Onstage and in Court," Patterson turns her attention to certain tragedies, comedies, and orations. By focusing on the Oresteia she concludes that Clytemnestra's adultery was a crime against the household. In Sophocles' Electra, the playwright is pessimistic as to whether the killing of Aegisthus can restore the household, while Euripides, in his Electra, points out how adultery can contaminate the next generation. In his comedies Aristophanes feels that punishment against adultery is justified. In the orations the moichos, such as Alcibiades, Agoratus, or Timarchus, is viewed as having sinned against the polis. With Aristotle, however, we find that the philosopher has less interest in the public consequences of adultery.Aristotle's separation of household from politics is taken up again in chapter 6, "Public and... (shrink)

ABSTRACTOrganization and management researchers praise the value of care in the workplace. However, they overlook the conflict between caring for work and for coworkers, which resonates with the dilemma of care allocation highlighted by ethicists of care. Through an in-depth qualitative study of two organizations, we examine how this dilemma is confronted in everyday organizational life. We draw on the concept of boundary work to explain how employees negotiate the boundary of their caring responsibilities in ways that grants or denies (...) care to coworkers. We argue that the possibility of an ethics of care for coworkers requires boundary work that suspends the separation of personal and professional selves and constitutes the worker as a whole person. We contribute to research on care in organizations by showing how care for coworkers may be enabled or undermined by maintaining or suppressing the care allocation dilemma. (shrink)

Poetry -- Drama -- Philosophy -- History -- Fables, Novels, and Speeches.

This Element has two aims. The first is to discuss arguments philosophers have made about the difference God's existence might make to questions of general interest in metaethics. The second is to argue that it is a mistake to think we can get very far in answering these questions by assuming a thin conception of God, and to suggest that exploring the implications of thick theisms for metaethics would be more fruitful.

Decades ago, several authors have proposed that disorders in automatic processing lead to intrusive symptoms or abnormal contents in the consciousness of people with schizophrenia. However, since then, studies have mainly highlighted difficulties in patients’ conscious experiencing and processing but rarely explored how unconscious and conscious mechanisms may interact in producing this experience. We report three lines of research, focusing on the processing of spatial frequencies, unpleasant information, and time-event structure that suggest that impairments occur at both the unconscious and (...) conscious level.We argue that focusing on unconscious, physiological and automatic processing of information in patients, while contrasting that processing with conscious processing, is a first required step before understanding how distortions or other impairments emerge at the conscious level. We then indicate that the phenomenological tradition of psychiatry supports a similar claim and provides a theoretical framework helping to understand the relationship between the impairments and clinical symptoms. We base our argument on the presence of disorders in the minimal self in patients with schizophrenia. The minimal self is tacit and non-verbal and refers to the sense of bodily presence. We argue this sense is shaped by unconscious processes, whose alteration may thus affect the feeling of being a unique individual. This justifies a focus on unconscious mechanisms and a distinction from those associated with consciousness. (shrink)

This article presents a systematic literature review documenting how technical investigations have been adapted in value sensitive design (VSD) studies from 1996 to 2023. We present a systematic review, including theoretical and applied studies that either discuss or conduct technical investigations in VSD. This systematic review contributes to the VSD community when seeking to further refine the methodological framework for carrying out technical investigations in VSD.

Studies in the behavioral ethics and moral psychology traditions have begun to reveal the important roles of self-related processes that underlie moral behavior. Unfortunately, this research has resulted in two distinct and opposing streams of findings that are usually referred to as moral consistency and moral compensation. Moral consistency research shows that a salient self-concept as a moral person promotes moral behavior. Conversely, moral compensation research reveals that a salient self-concept as an immoral person promotes moral behavior. This study’s aim (...) was to integrate these two literatures. We argued that compensation forms a reactive, “damage control” response in social situations, whereas consistency derives from a more proactive approach to reputation building and maintenance. Two experiments supported this prediction in showing that cognitive depletion (i.e., resulting in a reactive approach) results in moral compensation whereas consistency results when cognitive resources are available (i.e., resulting in a proactive approach). Experiment 2 revealed that these processes originate from reputational (rather than moral) considerations by showing that they emerge only under conditions of accountability. It can thus be concluded that reputational concerns are important for both moral compensation and moral consistency processes, and that which of these two prevails depends on the perspective that people take: a reactive or a proactive approach. (shrink)

The idea that states and the international community have a responsibility to protect populations at risk has framed internationalist debates about conflict prevention, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping and territorial administration since 2001. This book situates the responsibility to protect concept in a broad historical and jurisprudential context, demonstrating that the appeal to protection as the basis for de facto authority has emerged at times of civil war or revolution - the Protestant revolutions of early modern Europe, the bourgeois and communist revolutions (...) of the following centuries and the revolution that is decolonisation. This analysis, from Hobbes to the UN, of the resulting attempts to ground authority on the capacity to guarantee security and protection is essential reading for all those seeking to understand, engage with, limit or critique the expansive practices of international executive action authorised by the responsibility to protect concept. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn three experiments we investigated whether memory-independent evaluative conditioning and other memory-independent contingency learning effects occur in the valence contingency...

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve, taking its toll on people’s lives around the world, vaccine passports remain a contentious topic of debate in most liberal democracies. While a small literature on vaccine passports has sprung up over the past few years that considers their ethical pros and cons, in this paper we focus on the question of when vaccine passports are politically legitimate. Specifically, we put forward a ‘public reason ethics framework’ for resolving ethical disputes and use the (...) case of vaccine passports to demonstrate how it works. The framework walks users through a structured analysis of a vaccine passport proposal to determine whether the proposal can be publicly justified and is therefore legitimate. Use of this framework may also help policymakers to design more effective vaccine passports, by incorporating structured input from the public, and thereby better taking the public’s interests and values into account. In short, a public reason ethics framework is meant to encourage better, more legitimate decision-making, resulting in policies that are ethically justifiable, legitimate and effective. (shrink)

In this essay, we aim to ground an alliance between Cynthia Willett’s theory of an ethics of eros and Hasana Sharp’s argument for a politics of renaturalization. Both approaches seek a vocabulary and practices for ethical life, which is not circumscribed by the requirement of rationality and is deeply attentive to relationships. The relations to which an ethics of eros and renaturalization must attend include social relations – the tender ministrations of mothers, lovers, and friends that sustain and nourish (...) (and sometimes threaten) each of us. Our lives, bodies, and minds, however, are also deeply involved with the nonhuman environment. Our existence depends on air, water, bacteria, shelter, and infinite other nonhuman beings. Our desires and needs include a habitable environment and even "biophilia." The increasing fragility of our ecosystems suggests that there is more need than ever for an ethics that goes not just beyond man – although that is certainly an ongoing project – but beyond the human. This essay is an attempt to ally our approaches in the feminist effort to produce a broad basis for ethics, allowing for a robust consideration of nonhuman nature. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to question the significance of Derrida's deconstruction of the concepts of subject and history. While ‘postmodernity’ tends to be characterized by philosophical critique as the ‘liquidation of the subject’ or the ‘end of history’, I attempt to show that Derrida's deconstruction of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘historicity’ is not an elimination or destruction of these concepts, but an attempt to transform them in order to free them from their metaphysical-teleological presuppositions. This paper argues that this transformation, (...) which begins in Derrida's and continues in Stiegler's texts, leads to the notions of ‘psycho-social individuation’ and ‘doubly epokhal redoubling’. I maintain that such notions ‘supplement’ the metaphysical concepts of subject and history by forcing a reconsideration of the technical conditions of psychic individuation and the technological conditions of ‘epochality’. (shrink)

Here is the question: what constitutes a good explanation of phenomena?

Renaissance philosopher, mathematician, and theologian Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) said that there is no proportion between the finite mind and the infinite. He is fond of saying reason cannot fully comprehend the infinite. That our best hope for attaining a vision and understanding of infinite things is by mathematics and by the use of contemplating symbols, which help us grasp "the absolute infinite". By the late 19th century, there is a decisive intervention in mathematics and its philosophy: the philosophical mathematician (...) Georg Cantor (1845-1918) says that between the realm of the finite and the absolute infinite, there is an intermediate realm partaking in properties in a certain sense of both the finite and the infinite: the transfinite realm. Like the finite, the transfinite realm is a realm of mathematical objects, numbers, and knowledge. Like the absolute infinite, the transfinite is a form of infinity insofar as transfinite sets and numbers transcend any finite number. Echoing Cusanus and neo-Platonism, Cantor says that the transfinite sequence of all ordinals is a symbol of the absolutely infinite, that is, God. This paper considers how the doctrine of symbolism and the philosophers' different commitments to the laws of logic, especially the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), enables these thinkers to articulate a transcendental apophatic approach to divinity. (shrink)

Translational research is a buzzword which dominates discussions about the quality, the utilization, and the benefits of medical research. Yet, although translational research has become a prominent topic, no commonly agreed definition of this terminology exists. Instead, experts from different contexts such as biomedical research, clinical practice or nursing discuss translational research in multiple ways depending on how they define the problem that translational research is supposed to be the solution to. In this paper, we do not seek to find (...) a ‘correct’ definition of translational research, but instead ask how actors using this terminology for describing their own research make sense of it. To do so, we asked three questions: Which actors are engaged in the debate about translational research? What kind of different meanings of translational research exist? And, which actors refer to which meaning of translational research when using the term? In answering these questions, we highlight the role this terminology plays in defining what medical science is about today. (shrink)

The development of ethics case consultation over the past 30 years, initially in North America and recently in Western Europe, has primarily taken place in the secondary or tertiary healthcare settings. The predominant model for ethics consultation, in some countries overwhelmingly so, is a hospital-based clinical ethics committee. In the United States, accreditation boards suggest the ethics committee model as a way of meeting the ethics component of the accreditation requirement for payment by Health Maintenance Organizations, and in some European (...) countries, there are legislatory requirements or government recommendations for hospitals to have clinical ethics committees. There is no corresponding pressure for primary care services to have ethics committees or ethics consultants to advise clinicians, patients, and families on the difficult ethical decisions that arise in clinical practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I argue that, contrary to popular opinion, there is good reason to think that the qualities that make people good reasoners also make them better off. I will focus specifically on epistemic virtue: roughly, the kind of character in virtue of which one is excellently oriented towards epistemic goods. I propose that epistemic virtue is importantly implicated in the realization of some of the goods that are widely believed to be instrumental to, or even constitutive of, well-being. (...) Here I focus on one such good: friendship. (shrink)

After receiving a copy of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch’s friend Brian Medlin writes back: ‘So far I think I disagree with what you say in “Wittgenstein and the Inner Life,” but I’ll have to make sure that I’ve understood you aright before I launch into a complaint.’ Here, I reconstruct Murdoch’s reading of Wittgenstein and show its ambivalence. While Murdoch acknowledges Wittgenstein’s aim to dissolve illusionary ideas about the inner, she also thinks he presents substantial theses threatening (...) the reality of inner life. Murdoch’s misreading of Wittgenstein as a constructive philosopher may be what worries Medlin, and it also prevents Murdoch from seeing Wittgenstein as an ally in the endeavour to demonstrate the morally transformative potential of our inner lives. (shrink)

Thoughtprints Anne E. Berger andMarta Segarra I admit to it in the name of autobiography and in order to confide in you the following: [...] I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation of what I do, think, write, live, ...

The essays in this volume attempt to answer questions about gender in a variety of ways, but all see feminism as transforming the way we think about and act in politics.