A team of renowned philosophers and a new generation of thinkers come together to offer the first book-length examination of the relationship between philosophical anthropology and animal studies.

This is the first book to take nursing ethics beyond stock 'moral concepts' to a critical examination of the fundamental assumptions underlying the very nature of nursing. It takes as its point of departure the difficulties nurses experience practising within the confines of a bioethical model of health and illness and a hierarchical, technocratic health care system. The contributors go on to deal openly and honestly with controversial issues faced by nurses, such as euthanasia and HIV.

_The Ambiguity of Justice_ consists of a collection of essays that address difficulties and potential contradictions in thinking justice by focussing on Ricoeur's theory of justice and on the major thinkers that were influential for it.

A team of renowned philosophers and a new generation of thinkers come together to offer the first book-length examination of the relationship between philosophical anthropology and animal studies.

This book examines Paul Ricœur’s moral anthropology. It shows that his hermeneutical approach to responsibility and justice, focusing on the analysis of the singularity of lived existence, complements recent developments in moral philosophy that tend toward moral relativism and understand responsibility and justice in naturalistic terms.

Gender dysphoria (GD) is marked by an incongruence between a person’s biological sex at birth, and their felt gender (or gender identity). There is continuing debate regarding the benefits and drawbacks of physiological treatment of GD in children, a pathway, beginning with endocrine treatment to suppress puberty. Currently, the main alternative to physiological treatment consists of the so-called “wait-and-see” approach, which often includes counseling or other psychotherapeutic treatment. In this paper, we argue in favor of a “third pathway” for the (...) diagnosis and treatment of GD in youths. To make our case, we draw on a recent development in bioethics: the phenomenological approach. Scholars such as Slatman and Svenaeus have argued that the extent to which the body can (or should be) manipulated or reconstructed through medical intervention is not only determined by consideration of ethical frameworks and social and legal norms. Rather, we must also take account of patients’ personal experience of their body, the personal and social values associated with it, and their understanding of its situation in their life: their narrative identities. We apply this phenomenological approach to medicine and nursing to the diagnosis and treatment of GD in youth. In particular, we discuss Zahavi and Martiny’s conception of the phenomenological interview, in order to show that narrative techniques can assist in the process of gender identification and in the treatment of youth presenting with GD. We focus on two case studies that highlight the relevance of a narrative-based interview in relations between patients, HCPs, and family, to expose the influence of social ideologies on how young people presenting with GD experience their bodies and gender. (shrink)

This paper makes a comparison between enactivism and Levinas’ philosophy. Enactivism is a recent development in philosophy of mind and cognitive science that generally defines cognition in terms of a subject’s natural interactions with the physical environment. In recent years, enactivists have been focusing on social and ethical relations by introducing the concept of participatory sensemaking, according to which ethical know-how spontaneously emerges out of natural relations of participation and communication, that is, through the exchange of knowledge. This paper will (...) argue first that, although participatory sensemaking is a valuable concept in that it offers a practical and realistic way of understanding ethics, it nevertheless downplays the significance of otherness for understanding ethics. I will argue that Levinas’ work demonstrates in turn that otherness is significant for ethics in that we cannot completely anticipate others through participation or know-how. We cannot live the other’s experiences or suffering, which makes ethical relation so difficult and serious (e.g. care for a terminally ill person always falls short to a certain extent). I will argue next that enactivism and Levinas’ philosophy nevertheless do not exclude each other insofar they share a similar concept of subjectivity as a quality of naturally interacting with the external world to gain knowledge (Levinas speaks of dwelling). Finally, I will argue that enactivism’s notion of participatory sensemaking also offers something which Levinas’ insufficiently defines, namely a concept of social justice, based on equality and participation, that emerges out of natural relations. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology has significance for philosophy of mind, in particular for recent theories of enactivism, one of the most significant latest developments in cognitive theory. While philosophy of mind often finds its inspiration in hermeneutics and phenomenology, especially in Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, the later development of hermeneutical phenomenology under the influence of Gadamer and Ricoeur, as it evolved into the theory of the interpretation of narratives and lived existence, is often lost sight (...) of in recent debates about embodied cognition. I defend the thesis, however, that combining Ricoeur’s phenomenology with enactivism shows that embodied cognition has an intrinsic ethico-political aspect. The central argument is that, if we take that imagination and narrative lie at the heart of basic embodied cognition as interaction with the world (planning, motor skills, coordination), as both recent theories of enactivism and Ricoeur hold, then embodied cognition or the way in which we experience and gain knowledge in embodied cognitive relations with the world is ethically and politically significant in that it gets shaped by the ethical and political contexts in which these relations take place (e.g., cultural body images and morals in subcultures). These contexts contain ethical and political narratives and our imaginations are influenced by and work with these narratives in order to gain knowledge. This essay thus attempts to explore some of the possibilities of phenomenological hermeneutics for the philosophy of mind today. Keywords: phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, ethico- political world. (shrink)

Participatory sense-making is already an established concept within enactivism. It is used to define the participatory nature of cognitive relations, designating that humans and other organisms make sense of their surrounding environments not just on their own. They build cooperative networks, working together, to create ways of making sense of the world. However, so far little attention has been paid to how enactive concepts, such as participatory sense-making, may apply to the field of bioethics, understood here as health care ethics. (...) In this paper, I examine health care practices cases of participatory sense-making. The paper aims to show that relations between patients and health care providers (HCPs) can be understood as participatory sense-making relations. To make my case, I discuss the so-called phenomenological interview, as proposed technique in health care. I argue that this interview technique has essential features that can be viewed also as features of participatory sense-making. More specifically, the phenomenological interview is an open-minded, a critical, and pro-active dialogue between patient and health care provider that is meant for the patient to raise self-awareness of their body and medical condition, as well as of the social conditions that may affect that experience and condition. I will argue that phenomenological interviews are exemplary cases of patient-health care provider relations in which both parties actively work together to make sense of what the patient is going through and to find adequate medical responses to that experience. I will conclude by proposing normative guidance based on my analysis of health care practice as participatory sense-making. I argue that viewing patient-HCP relations as participatory sense-making may be helpful for both patients and health care providers in that it shows that health care practice is not just a technical exercise or routine task, but essentially relational and patient-oriented. (shrink)

In this article I will examine Ricœur’s idea of the universal in his understanding of justice. Scholars recently discussed the extent to which Ricœur understands universal moral norms and universal rules of justice in his anthropology of human action, and argue that Ricœur stresses too much the idea of universal moral norms with regard to cultural and moral diversity,. G. H. Taylor, “Reenvisioning Justice,” Lo Squarda 12 : 65-80). In this article I will take part in the debate about universalism (...) and approach Ricœur’s idea of the universal from a different angle, in placing it in light of his idea of evil. The point I will aim to make in this article is that Ricœur’s idea of the relation between justice and evil demonstrates what I understand as the ambiguity of justice, which highlights the difficulty of defining universal rules of justice. I will argue that this ambiguity is the following: justice aims at the establishment of social peace and in that sense it is the necessary remedy against human evil, but justice also implies power, and possibly violence, over others in that it relates to violent feelings of vengeance, to institutional mechanism of authority, and to a struggle of values. Yet if rules of justice relate to evil in the sense of power over others, so I argue, then it is problematic to define absolute criteria for rules of justice, i.e., for rules for social peace: because justice relates to particular values, which means that the risk of violence is inherent to institutional rules of justice, there is no ultimate universal set of such rules. This article therefore questions Ricœur’s understanding of universal rules of justice in Oneself as Another. Yet, I will also draw on a series of other texts of Ricœur on justice, and argue that Ricœur’s idea of justice allows understanding how we find common sensibilities about justice through dialogue, a sensibility for the other, and narratives as a way of critique of existing moral norms and rules of justice. (shrink)

Recent enactive accounts of cognition have begun to disentangle social and normative aspects of the human mind. In this paper, we will contribute to this debate by developing an enactive account of moral development, i.e. the learning of ethical norms, and critical engagement with these norms through social affordances, participatory sense-making, and moral concern. The difficulty in articulating such an account is in reconciling the affective embodied aspects of moral experiences with the more orthodox aspects of ethics like critical reflection. (...) In order to respond to this difficulty, we bring Ricoeur’s hermeneutics into dialogue with enactivism. Complementing the enactive tradition, we frame critical ethical learning as embodied interaction with diverse ethical dimensions allowing us to incorporate moral values in the form of critical narratives and the social imaginary. We agree with enactivist theories that participation and democratic dialogue are essential parts of critical reflection on ethical norms. Yet, we also contend that this kind of critical reflection benefits from hermeneutical interpretation, challenging larger participatory networks, such as social institutions, which nourish inequality and maintain unethical values. (shrink)

Introduction (française) au numéro sur les "frontières de la justice".

This article examines Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of analytical philosophy of language. I argue that Ricoeur’s idea of responsibility is exemplary for understanding this discussion and for understanding how Ricoeur conceives of the task of phenomenological hermeneutics in relation to analytical philosophy and cognitive science. According to Ricoeur, analytical philosophy of language explains how we use ordinary language for ascribing responsibility to the actions of agents (e.g., X is responsible for giving a speech). I argue that Ricoeur shows that the task (...) of cognitive science is similar: explaining the causal relation between human action and the physical body (e.g., the debate on responsibility and neuroscience). Yet analytical philosophy of language insufficiently understands responsibility, for Ricoeur, in making an abstraction of the question of what it means to be responsible. Whereas analytical philosophy of language explains the causes of human action, so Ricoeur contends, it does not explain its motives, because these are not empirical relations that we can identify by means of common language. The task of phenomenological hermeneutics consists then, so I aim to demonstrate in line with Ricoeur, in understanding the motives of human action, which implies interpretation of text and of the self’s narrative identity: in narratives we learn the reasons for being responsible. (shrink)

Both the diagnosis and medical treatment of gender dysphoria —particularly in children and adolescents—have been the subject of significant controversy in recent years. In this paper, we outline the means by which GD is diagnosed in children and adolescents, the currently available treatment options, and the bioethical issues these currently raise. In particular, we argue that the families and healthcare providers of children presenting with GD currently face two main ethical dilemmas in decision making regarding treatment: the pathway dilemma and (...) the consent dilemma. (shrink)

The contributions in this book address the relation between evil, symbolism and psychoanalysisc by focusing on the two works of Riœur in which these topics play the most prominent role: The Symbolism of Evil and Freud and Philosophy. Furthermore, the bilingual book includes contributions that examine the relation between evil, symbolism and psychoanalysis in Ricœur’s work in a more general fashion, by investigating his philosophy as a whole. It brings together both French and English chapters from leading Ricœur scholars from (...) over the world. The international multilinguistic perspective reflects Ricœur’s spirit who said that when he worked on a book, all of the others were simultaneously open on his writing table. It is a groundbreaking work to those interested in Ricœur, Freud and religion. (shrink)

Ashley’s response to our recent paper argues that a fuller appreciation of the available clinical data, of the rights of children to autonomy, and of the primary purpose of gender-affirming endocrine treatment supports the rejection of both the pathway and consent dilemmas for the treatment of gender dysphoria, as raised in this journal. In this response, we highlight certain misrepresentations of our argument, and defend our conclusions against Ashley’s main objections.

Combining perspectives from both continental and analytic philosophy, this timely volume explores how imagination today both shapes and is shaped by technology, art and ethics. Imagination is one of the most significant and broadly examined concepts in contemporary philosophy and is frequently understood as a basic human faculty that enables complex activities. This book shows, however, that imagination is more than a mere enabler. Whilst imagination shapes our experiences, it is at the same time shaped by our environments. Some of (...) the most creative manifestations of imagination are the result of its two-way interaction with art or technology, or both. In short, imagination co-shapes us. Beyond the traditional perspectives of Kant and Heidegger, The Philosophy of Imagination: Technology, Art and Ethics examines our dynamic relationship with imagination, from contemporary technological advancements such as AI that transform the whole ecosystem to imagination in the context of videogames and literary fiction. Analysing societal imagination, it addresses the relationship between the racial imaginary and white ignorance, as well as the effects that societal mechanisms such as lockdowns can have on our imagination. Taking its cue from the here and now, this volume brings together leading international scholars to investigate how the concept of co-shaping allows us to see imagination and its crucial role in society in new and productive ways. (shrink)

Originally published in 1967, this book aims to develop an ethical theory which remedies the defects of Utilitarianism while recognising the truths upon which Utilitarians have insisted. Its thesis is offered as a challenge to all schools of moral philosophy which have flourished in the twentieth century. Dr Grice argues that there are two kinds of Judgement of moral obligation. Social Contract theory, in a form which avoids the classical objections, is employed in setting out the ground of basic obligations; (...) and the ultra obligations of individual men are found to be grounded in their own characters. He then demonstrates that the theory offered, unlike Utilitarianism, throws light on judgements of rights and justice. Moral good is seen eventually as the coping stone, not the foundation stone of morality. (shrink)

This study discovers a pattern to Diderot's thinking, a fundamental dualism attributable largely to the attitudes and assumptions of the time and giving a common structure to his ideas and writing. Geoffrey Bremner draws widely on Diderot's works in studying his ideas on perception and action, aesthetics, ethics and politics, as well as his plays and fiction. The subtlety of the textual analysis and the analogies Dr Bremner draws provide a convincing and illuminating argument for his interpretation. He supports (...) this but emphasising the intellectual circumstances in which Diderot wrote and demonstrating his links to other eighteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. His study will therefore make a valuable contribution to the reassessment of the period that is currently underway, as well as to the central, elusive problem presented by Diderot's thought itself. (shrink)

A recent paper by Teresa Baron and Geoffrey Dierckxsens argues that puberty blockers and hormone therapy should be disallowed before adulthood on prudential and consent-related grounds. This response contends that their argument fails because it is predicated on unsupported premises and misinterpretations of the available evidence. There is no evidence that a large proportion of pubertal and postpubertal youths later discontinue medical transition. Meaningful assent is a viable and commonly accepted alternative to meaningful consent in paediatric bioethics. And (...) finally, the primary purpose of transition-related interventions is to actualise youths’ gendered self-image, not treat an underlying mental illness. (shrink)

The Marxist history of science has played an enormous role in the development of the history of science. Whether through the appreciation of its insights or the construction of a political fortress to prevent infusion, its presence is felt. From 1931 the work of Marxists played an integral part in the international development of the history of science, though rarely have the connections between them or their own biographies been explored. These networks convey a distinct history, alongside political, methodological and (...) personal implications, impressing on us a greater understanding of the possibilities that were present and were lost in the most turbulent of decades. Two of the most notable were Boris Hessen, a founder of Marxist history of science, and J. G. Crowther, one of its most prolific exponents. My examination explores aspects of the dialogue between these controversial figures, starting with brief biographical sketches. Their lives became briefly entwined following the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in 1931, demonstrated with reference to the meeting and the correspondence between them until Hessen's death. In doing so, some new facts and old controversies surface, though most importantly the nature of the correspondence carries implications for the Marxist history of science and for the wider movement of which it is part. The Russian delegation to the congress declared that science was at a crossroads. The history of science was at a similar crossroads in the 1930s. (shrink)

I give an account of the difference between "Holistic" and "Atomistic" views of conscious experience. On the Holistic view, we enjoy a unified "field" of awareness, whose parts are mere modifications of the whole, and therefore owe their existence to the whole. There is some tendency to saddle those who reject the Holistic field model with a (perhaps) implausible "building block" view. I distinguish a number of different theses about the parts of an experience that are suggested by the "building (...) block" metaphor, but which can be rejected by those who also reject the holistic field view. (shrink)

A visual imagery task is presented which is beyond the limits of normal human ability, and some of the factors contributing to its difficulty are isolated by comparing the difficulty of related tasks. It is argued that complex objects are assigned hierarchical structural descriptions by being parsed into parts, each of which has its own local system of significant directions. Two quite different schemas for a wire‐frame cube are used to illustrate this theory, and some striking perceptual differences to which (...) they give rise are described. The difficulty of certain mental imagery tasks is shown to depend on which of the alternative structural descriptions of an object is used, and this is interpreted as evidence that structural descriptions are an important component of mental images. Finally, it is argued that analog transformations like mental folding involve changing the values of continuous variables in a structural description. (shrink)

What is death and why does it matter to us? How should the knowledge of our finitude affect the living of our lives and what are the virtues suitable to mortal beings? Does death destroy the meaningfulness of lives, or would lives that never ended be eternally and absurdly tedious? Should we reconcile ourselves to the fact of our forthcoming death, or refuse to "go gently into that good night"? Can death really be an evil if, after death, we no (...) longer exist as subjects of goods or evils? How should we respond to the deaths of others and do we have any duties towards the dead? These, and many other, questions are addressed in Geoffrey Scarre's book, which draws upon a wide variety of philosophical and literary sources to offer an up-to-date and highly readable study of some major ethical and metaphysical riddles concerning death and dying. (shrink)

The primary objective of this article is to develop a framework for analyzing the ethical foundations and implications of shareholder wealth maximization (SWM). Distinctions between SWM and the more widely examined construct of profit maximization are identified, the most significant being the central role played in SWM by the market mechanism for pricing the corporation''s securities. It is argued that empirical tests concerned with evaluating the ethical implications of SWM will almost surely involve a joint hypothesis. A number of recent (...) empirical studies aimed at testing hypotheses with explicit ethical content are reviewed. (shrink)

A history of the pre-Socratic philosophers, with selected writings and texts.

It is increasingly common in cognitive science and philosophy of perception to regard perceptual processing as a probabilistic engine, taking into account uncertainty in computing representations of the distal environment. Models of this kind often postulate probabilistic representations, or what we will call probabilistic states,. These are states that in some sense mark or represent information about the probabilities of distal conditions. It has also been argued that perceptual experience itself in some sense represents uncertainty (Morrison _Analytic Philosophy_ 57 (1): (...) 15 48, 2016 ). In this article, we will first consider three models of sensory activity from perceptual neuroscience, namely signal detection theory (SDT), probabilistic population codes (PPC), and sampling. We will then reflect on the sense in which the probabilistic states introduced in these models are probabilistic representations. To sharpen this discussion, we will compare and contrast these probabilistic states to credences as they are understood in epistemology. We will suggest that probabilistic representation, in an appropriately robust sense, can be understood as a form of analog representation. In the last part of the paper, we apply this to the issue of whether conscious experience represents uncertainty—we will interpret this as the claim that there are phenomenal features of experience that serve as analog probabilistic representations. (shrink)

I offer some responses to Prosser’s ‘Experiencing Time’, one of whose goals is to debunk a view of temporal experience somewhat prevalent in the metaphysics literature, which I call ‘Perceptualism’. According to Perceptualism: it is part of the content of perceptual experience that time passes in a metaphysically strong sense: the present has a metaphysically privileged status, and time passes in virtue of changes in which events this ‘objective present’ highlights, and moreover this gives us evidence in favor of strong (...) passage. Prosser argues that perception cannot be sensitive to whether the strong passage obtains, and therefore cannot represent strong passage in a way that gives us evidence of its truth. Although I accept this conclusion, I argue that Prosser’s argument for it is problematic. It threatens to over-generalize to rule out uncontroversial cases of perceptual knowledge, such as our knowledge that we live in a spatial world. Furthermore, a successful argument ruling out perceptual evidence for strong passage would have to give constraints on the theory/observation distinction of a kind not provided by Prosser’s discussion. I also comment on several other parts of the book. (shrink)

In 2005, Chinese President Hu Jintao instituted a “Harmonious Society” policy marking a new China’s approach toward development. This generated intense excitement among observers of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) who perceive an overlap in objectives between CSR and Harmonious Society and believe that Harmonious Society will lead to increased CSR engagement in China. However, there is little exploration of how Harmonious Society will contribute to increasing CSR engagement. This article seeks to explore whether Harmonious Society will meet this promise. It (...) does so by drawing up a list of actions that if taken by the government would increase the level of CSR in China and make Harmonious Society a relevant factor in the development of Chinese CSR. To do so, my article studies comparative literature on CSR development to develop a framework that divides causes of CSR in a country into environmental constraints and discretionary responses. Understanding what drives the development of CSR allows us to understand what measures the Chinese government can take to influence the level of CSR. Using this framework, my article suggests that Harmonious Society is unlikely to promote CSR in China’s growing private sector because policy measures that affect the “constraints” driving CSR are bounded by other political considerations. (shrink)

This is the first of a pair of papers. It focuses on the development of the most notable phlogistic theories during the period 1766–1791, including the main experiments that their proponents proposed them to interpret. There was a rapid proliferation of late phlogistic theories, particularly from 1784, and the accounts of composition and important implications of the main theories are set out and their issues analysed. Each of them either reached impasses due to internal problems, or included features that made (...) them unacceptable even to other phlogistians. The expositions and analyses of these theories are given in terms of details that were in the literature at the time or otherwise potentially understandable by the participants given contemporary practice. Some relevant methodological aspects of the history of science are discussed, and the secondary literature is briefly surveyed. The second paper deals with the contemporary development of the new chemistry, and with theory comparison and theory choice in the same period. (shrink)

What assumptions are built into the claim that experience has “phenomenal properties,” and could these assumptions turn out to be false? I consider the issue specifically for the similarity relations between experiences: for example, experiences of different shades of red are more similar to each other than an experience of red and an experience of green. It is commonly thought that we have a special kind of epistemic access to experience that is more secure than our access to the external (...) environment. In the first part of the paper, I argue than one way of elucidating this claim is especially plausible—that systematic error, of the kind subjects make about the external environment in traditional “skeptical” scenarios, is not conceivable for introspection of experience, including for our knowledge of similarity relations. I argue that focusing on similarity relations gives us a more interesting version of the argument than for other forms of experiential introspection. Then in the second part of the paper I describe an example, inspired by a similar case due to Sydney Shoemaker, in which a subject, despite being fully rational and attentive, apparently is systematically mistaken about the character of their experience in a surprising way. I argue that the example calls into question whether there are properties of experience satisfying the epistemic access constraint, and therefore whether experience has “phenomenal properties” in the intuitive sense. (shrink)

J. Hillis Miller (1928–2021) was one of the most prominent figures in literary criticism and theory. After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University, he taught at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University and the University of California at Irvine. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 2002. Miller was president of the Modern Language Association of America in 1986 and contributed significantly to professional academic institutions and organizations throughout his career. As an important representative of the Yale School, he had close relationships (...) with Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom. Dr. Ning Yizhong did postdoctoral research under his supervision at UCI from 1997 to 1998. This is part of his interviews with Professor Miller during that time. In this interview, Miller talks about the Yale School in general, and Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Harold Bloom in particular. 1. (shrink)