Background Nigeria is an emerging hub of biomedical research, requiring additional trained bioethicists for ethical oversight of research studies. There are currently two graduate-level health research ethics programs in Nigeria. However, both are in the southern part of the country and no such training programs exist in the north. Strengthening the health research ethics skills and knowledge of Nigerian researchers across the country is necessary given the growing genetics research infrastructure. Methods To inform the creation of a Master of Science (...) in Health Research Ethics program in northern Nigeria, we conducted a needs assessment comprised of semi-structured interviews with nine Nigerian bioethics experts. We used the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) method to analyze interview transcriptions. Two authors independently read and coded each respondent’s transcript to identify emergent themes that represented each respondent’s answers. Within these overarching themes, the data points were grouped into subthemes. Results Four primary themes emerged with ten subthemes. Respondents believed that the program can fill a gap and strengthen capacity in health research ethics. They emphasized that the curriculum should be developed with an interdisciplinary lens and locally contextualized, and that students should be taught how to think critically through ethical scenarios. Respondents stressed that program leaders should recruit faculty and students locally who have the bandwidth to participate in the program. Finally, respondents noted the program should have university support to be sustainable. Conclusion Our findings will guide the creation of a master’s degree program that aims to build capacity in health research ethics in northern Nigeria and enhance the country’s growing prominence in global biomedical research. Through our needs assessment, we identified structural and content factors that can guide us in leveraging the strengths of the local institution and leaders in health research ethics while mitigating challenges in establishing this program. (shrink)

In Rousseau's Republican Romance, Elizabeth Wingrove combines political theory and narrative analysis to argue that Rousseau's stories of sex and sexuality offer important insights into the paradoxes of democratic consent. She suggests that despite Rousseau's own protestations, "man" and "citizen" are not rival or contradictory ideals. Instead, they are deeply interdependent. Her provocative reconfiguration of republicanism introduces the concept of consensual nonconsensuality--a condition in which one wills the circumstances of one's own domination. This apparently paradoxical possibility appears at the (...) center of Rousseau's republican polity and his romantic dyad: in both instances, the expression and satisfaction of desire entail a twin experience of domination and submission.Drawing on a wide variety of Rousseau's political and literary writings, Wingrove shows how consensual nonconsensuality organizes his representations of desire and identity. She demonstrates the inseparability of republicanism and accounts of heterosexuality in an analysis that emphasizes the sentimental and somatic aspects of citizenship. In Rousseau's texts, a politics of consent coincides with a performative politics of desire and of emotion. Wingrove concludes that understanding his strategies of democratic governance requires attending to his strategies of symbolization. Further, she suggests that any understanding of political practice requires attending to bodily practices. (shrink)

Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory to ground a feminist ontology of biology has been particularly controversial. Most critics have understood Grosz as supporting her theory with empirical evidence, and they criticize her for being either inaccurate or uncritical of and overly dependent on science. I argue that Grosz reads Darwin as a philosopher in a Deleuzian and Irigarayan sense, and that Grosz's project is therefore better understood in terms of its ethical and political goals rather than in (...) terms of empirical adequacy. Employing this evaluative framework leads to a novel route for critique of Grosz's ontology in terms of its reliance on the Darwinian distinction between organism and environment. I conclude that Grosz's work is valuable for the way it maintains ethical and political considerations in feminist ontological debates, and that introducing a more sensitive understanding of the organism–environment relation will lead us closer to a truly feminist ontology of biology. (shrink)

Background: Managing HIV treatment is a complex multi-dimensional task because of a combination of factors such as stigma and discrimination of some populations who frequently get infected with HIV. In addition, patient-provider encounters have become increasingly multicultural, making effective communication and provision of ethically sound care a challenge. Purpose: This article explores ethical issues that health service providers in the United States and Botswana encountered in their interaction with patients in HIV care. Research design: A descriptive qualitative design was used (...) to collect data from health service providers and patients using focused group discussions. This article is based on responses from health service providers only. Participants and context: This article is based on 11 focused group discussions with a total sample of 71 service providers in seven US sites and one Botswana site. Ethical considerations: Ethical review boards at all the study sites reviewed the study protocol and approved it. Ethical review boards of the study’s coordinating centers, Rutgers University and the University of California at San Francisco, also approved it. The study participants provided a written informed consent to participate. Findings: HIV service providers encountered ethical challenges in all the four Beauchamp and Childress’ biomedical ethics of respect for patients’ autonomy, beneficence, justice, and nonmaleficence. Discussion: The finding that HIV service providers encounter ethical challenges in their interaction with patients is supported by prior studies. The ethical challenges are particularly prominent in multicultural care and resource-constrained care environments. Conclusion: Provision of HIV care is fraught with ethical challenges that tend to pose different issues depending on a given care environment. It is important that strong partnerships are developed among key stakeholders in HIV care. In addition, health service providers need to be provided with resources so they can provide quality and ethically sound care. (shrink)

Elizabeth Griffith’s play A Wife in the Right (1772) features a nabob character, a British man returned from India after having made his fortune through imperial pursuits. This article explores Griffith’s use of the nabob and how the theme of national identity is linked to a discourse around the potential gap between external appearance and internal character in this drama. This article aims to contribute to the growing scholarship surrounding female dramatists in the long eighteenth century by providing an (...) initial step in close reading this drama by Griffith in the context of philosophy and medical writing of the period. Applying, more specifically, Adam Smith’s philosophical and George Cheyne’s medical writing to a close reading of A Wife in the Right, this article reads Griffith’s nabob character and her commentary on national identity as part of a broader social performance of self in this period. (shrink)

We live in a society that promotes the universal process of producing knowledge and truth making as fundamental social process. Such promotion of universality seems to subjugate others forms of knowing rendering them invisible, unintelligible, and ineligible and subsequently outside the community of knowing. This has material and symbolic consequences in terms of how research informs policy and subsequent victimization of those who live, and experience subjugation meted by Western truth making universalism. In the words of Foucault, this book is (...) an insurrection of subterranean and clandestine knowledges in ways that provide not just an alternative process of knowledge production but affirms local knowledge as necessary in production of a just society. The book looks at research as a social justice and transformational process that should speak of people's ways of live without necessarily streamlining them into numbers. The book is a critically reflexive project in terms of returning processes of knowledge production to the local space rather than imagining them as entirely centred in the structure. To imagine this book as reflexive exercise is to break boundaries of knowledges in ways that come to imagine how local performs global in very complicated and complex ways. This book is a resurrection of local knowledges steeped in creative and imaginative reflexive methodologies that come to reorient how we come to know what we know, the values and realities that mark what we know and the how of knowledge production. It centres subjugated voices and knowledges as fundamental in production of knowledge. Contributors include: Katie Bannon, Elizabeth Charles, Khulood Agha Khan, Dionisio Nyaga, Fritz Pino, and Rose Ann Torres. (shrink)

In her recent case study, Elizabeth Potter attempts to show how Boyle's experimental method was biased by gender considerations. Part of her argument focuses on the combination of the “invisibility” of women in Boyle's published work together with his unpublished comments on female chastity, and part concerns Boyle's rejection of the animistic explanation of his air pump experiments by Francis Line. I argue that the historical and biographical elements of the case make Potter's arguments questionable. In addition, I address (...) whether and how such historical cases can shed light on current debates about gender issues and argue that Boyle's methodological writings could be used to better advantage in the feminist cause. (shrink)

A special issue of Philosophical Studies containing selected papers from the 1999 meeting of the Pacific Division American Philosophical Association (Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, guest editor).

& Visual object representation was studied in free-ranging rhesus monkeys. To facilitate comparison with humans, and to provide a new tool for neurophysiologists, we used a looking time procedure originally developed for studies of human infants. Monkeys’ looking times were measured to displays with one or two distinct objects, separated or together, stationary or moving. Results indicate that rhesus monkeys..

ABSTRACT Perpetuation of privileged norming in organizations threatens the fragile hope that the theory and practice of professionalism can evolve alongside commitments to equity and inclusion. Uncritical engagement with a normative professionalism can lead to the muting of differences and strengths that diverse standpoints offer to professional communities. We look to the field of Medicine as an example for other professional groups, in which experts have criticized its development of a normative professionalism shaped by, retaining, and sustaining privilege. Using a (...) triad of case studies and co-cultural theory, we suggest that non-dominant perspectives and behaviors ought to be better recognized and welcomed as part of professionalism discourse, and that professional education ought to include co-cultural awareness of communication behaviors and their function as identity performance. We suggest that recognizing and reinforcing accommodation behaviors will lead to a more robust inclusivity for an evolving normativity, and that the wisdom habits of curiosity, perspective, love of learning, judgment, and creativity must be brought to bear on improving co-cultural dialogue, dismantling systemic privilege, practicing attributional complexity, and building genuinely dialogic professional communities rather than depersonalized collectives. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism continues to serve as a rich source of moral and theoretical insight. This collection of articles by top scholars offers fresh interpretations of Mill's ideas about happiness, moral obligation, justice, and rights. Applying contemporary philosophical insights, the articles challenge the conventional readings of Mill, and, in the process, contribute to a deeper understanding of utilitarian theory as well as the complexity of moral life.

In section 1 of An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume claims that those who deny the reality of morals are disingenuous. He also notes that philosophy has had a history of disagreements about whether morals originate in reason or in sentiment. Throughout his book, Hume applies an experimental method to find the “universal principles” from which morality is ultimately derived. Then, in Appendix 1, he then argues for the origin of these principles in sentiment or taste, a product (...) of “the human fabric.” Reason, Hume says, discovers objects “as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution.” Taste “has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation.” How can the quest for universal principles find a satisfactory answer in taste, a “productive” faculty? How is the notion that morality is a “new creation” consistent with an insistence on the reality of moral distinctions? Are the deliverances of taste, which are prompts to virtue, also judgments that can be evaluated as true or false? This essay shows that, on a proper reading, the elements of Hume’s moral epistemology in the second Enquiry are largely consistent. (shrink)

This study analyzed 328 single- and group-authored stories composed by nine 4-year-olds in a mixed-age preschool class participating in a peer-oriented storytelling and story-acting practice. Group-authored stories were overwhelmingly told by same-gender groups. The frequencies, developmental trajectories, and functions of group-authored stories were different for girls and boys. Girls told mostly group-authored stories in the fall and single-authored stories in the spring. Group-authoring provided ‘brain-storming sessions’ for narrative experimentation; these stories were longer, with more dramatic problems and more sophisticated character (...) portrayals. By the spring, girls’ single-authored stories also included these features, suggesting internalized narrative gains. Boys consistently preferred single-authored stories, though in the spring the frequency and quality of their group-authored stories increased. These were longer, with more sophisticated character portrayals, than single-authored stories. Group-authored stories made a distinctive contribution to narrative development, partly by helping boys and girls overcome limitations of their preferred narrative genres. (shrink)

What happens when adjudication signals its own artifice? Or when jurisprudence is animated by what Maksymilian Del Mar calls ‘legal artifacts’ that invite us to suspend certain of our prevailing no...

Under many circumstances, children and adult rats reorient themselves through a process which operates only on information about the shape of the environment (e.g., Cheng, 1986; Hermer & Spelke, 1996). In contrast, human adults relocate themselves more flexibly, by conjoining geometric and nongeometric information to specify their position (Hermer & Spelke, 1994). The present experiments used a dual-task method to investigate the processes that underlie the flexible conjunction of information. In Experiment 1, subjects reoriented themselves flexibly when they performed no (...) secondary task, but they reoriented themselves like children and adult rats when they engaged in verbal shadowing of continuous speech. In Experiment 2, subjects who engaged in nonverbal shadowing of a continuous rhythm reoriented like nonshadowing subjects, suggesting that the interference effect in Experiment 1 did not stem from general limits on working memory or attention but from processes more specific to language. In further experiments, verbally shadowing subjects detected and remembered both nongeometric information (Experiment 3) and geometric information (Experiments 1, 2, and 4), but they failed to conjoin the two types of information to specify the positions of objects (Experiment 4). Together. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay meditates on the entanglement of history and memory with forgetfulness, with silencing, with what is before or outside speech. Recalling along the way a few of the manifold varieties of the unthinkable made manifest in recent events, it notes the same mute iteration that led Freud to the death drive, only to be troubled once again by the very same repetitions enfolded in the diagnosis of cultural malaise Freud built upon his insight. Turning to Georg Simmel’s Philosophy (...) of Money for an alternative, non-psychoanalytic account of unconscious purpose as a trans-individual, cultural phenomenon, it arrives once again at the hypertrophic life-technologies of the modern—and at Simmel’s account of money as the ultimate being without qualities, “the most extreme … configuration of Geist” itself, which so thoroughly underpins ways of living that, obscuring dimensions of value that cannot be quantified, silently hum on in the face of catastrophe. (shrink)

A century after the advent of quantum mechanics and general relativity, both theories enjoy incredible empirical success, constituting the cornerstones of modern physics. Yet, paradoxically, they suffer from deep-rooted, so-far intractable, conflicts. Motivations for violations of the notion of relativistic locality include the Bell’s inequalities for hidden variable theories, the cosmological horizon problem, and Lorentz-violating approaches to quantum geometrodynamics, such as Horava–Lifshitz gravity. Here, we explore a recent proposal for a “real ensemble” non-local description of quantum mechanics, in which “particles” (...) can copy each others’ observable values AND phases, independent of their spatial separation. We first specify the exact theory, ensuring that it is consistent and has quantum mechanics as a fixed point, where all particles with the same values for a given observable have the same phases. We then study the stability of this fixed point numerically, and analytically, for simple models. We provide evidence that most systems are locally stable to small deviations from quantum mechanics, and furthermore, the phase variance per value of the observable, as well as systematic deviations from quantum mechanics, decay as \ time)\, where \. Interestingly, this convergence is controlled by the absolute value of energy, suggesting a possible connection to gravitational physics. Finally, we discuss different issues related to this theory, as well as potential novel applications for the spectrum of primordial cosmological perturbations and the cosmological constant problem. (shrink)

Despite increasing interest in the figure of Socrates and in love in ancient Greece, no recent monograph studies these topics in all four of Plato's dialogues on love and friendship. This book provides important new insights into these subjects by examining Plato's characterization of Socrates in Symposium, Phaedrus, Lysis and the often neglected Alcibiades I. It focuses on the specific ways in which the philosopher searches for wisdom together with his young interlocutors, using an art that is 'erotic', not in (...) a narrowly sexual sense, but because it shares characteristics attributed to the daimon Eros in Symposium. In all four dialogues, Socrates' art enables him, like Eros, to search for the beauty and wisdom he recognizes that he lacks and to help others seek these same objects of erôs. Belfiore examines the dialogues as both philosophical and dramatic works, and considers many connections with Greek culture, including poetry and theater. (shrink)

Research on human infants has begun to shed light on early-developing processes for segmenting perceptual arrays into objects. Infants appear to perceive objects by analyzing three-dimensional surface arrangements and motions. Their perception does not accord with a general tendency to maximize figural goodness or to attend to nonaccidental geometric relations in visual arrays. Object perception does accord with principles governing the motions of material bodies: Infants divide perceptual arrays into units that move as connected wholes, that move separately from one (...) another, that tend to maintain their size and shape over motion, and that tend to act upon each other only on contact. These findings suggest that o general representation of object unity and boundaries is interposed between representations of surfaces and representations of objects of familiar kinds. The processes that construct this representation may be related to processes of physical reasoning. (shrink)

A radical implication of Hume’s theory of motivation is that it makes no sense, strictly speaking, to call actions rational or irrational. So, he claims, it is not contrary to reason for me to prefer the destruction of the world to getting a scratch on my finger.