This paper argues that professionals who make boundary-related decisions should be guided by relationship-based practice. In our roles as service users and professionals, drawing from our lived experiences of professional relationships, we argue we need to move away from distance-based practice. This includes understanding the boundary stories and narratives that exist for all of us – including the people we support, other professionals, as well as the organisations and systems within which we work. When we are dealing with professional boundary (...) issues, we should centre relationship-building skills that are central to many other aspects of our work. Skills that foster relationships at all levels – between professionals, service users, and services – need to be revalued. Our final recommendation is to create, develop, and foster safer spaces within and outside of organisations, as well as inter-professionally, for the discussion and exploration of boundary-related issues and practice. We are interested in hearing from those with experiences of being marginalised by boundaries so that they can inform a reshaping of our collective ideas around boundary related practices. To foster relationship-based practices in organisations, we have outlined several recommendations here; however, we recognize that these do not go far enough, and that collective action is needed to inform systemic change. (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)

Brian Wormald provides a fundamental reappraisal of one of the most complex and innovative figures of the late-Elizabethan and Jacobean age. In the centuries since his death, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) has been perceived and studied as a promoter and prophet of the philosophy of science--natural science--but he saw himself also as a clarifier and promoter of what he called "policy" or the study and improvement of the structure and function of civil states. Mr. Wormald shows that Bacon was concerned equally (...) with the knowledge of the world of nature and with that of policy. The junction between the two enterprises was effected by his work in history; and in the end it was Bacon's conception and practice of history that provided the answer to his efforts to advance policy and natural philosophy. (shrink)

Many senior doctors have had little in the way of formal ethics training, but express considerable interest in extending their education in this area. This paper is the report of an initiative in continuing medical education in which doctors were introduced to narrative ethics. We review the theoretical basis of narrative ethics, and the structure of and response to the two-day workshop.

In response to the recent antitheory movement which has called into question the relevance of theory itself, this paper seeks to defend the practice of theory. Taking hermeneutical theory as its model, it seeks to show how a properly postmodern conception of the role and function of theory eludes the criticisms elaborated by various antitheorists. In formulating a new way of envisaging the relation betweeen theory and practice, it seeks not only to defend the theoretical enterprise but to demonstrate as (...) well its importance for the discursive practices of the human sciences and for sociopolitical praxis. (shrink)

There are two types of fluctuations in the quantum vacuum: type 1 vacuum fluctuations are on shell and can interact with matter in specific, limited ways that have observable consequences; type 2 vacuum fluctuations are off shell and cannot interact with matter. A photon will polarize a type 1, bound, charged lepton–antilepton vacuum fluctuation in much the same manner that it would polarize a dielectric, suggesting the method used here for calculating the permittivity $$\epsilon _{0}$$ϵ0 of the vacuum. In a (...) model that retains only leading terms, $$\epsilon _{0} \cong ^{2}= 9.10\times 10^{-12}$$ϵ0≅2=9.10×10-12 C/. The calculated value for $$\epsilon _{0}$$ϵ0 is 2.7% more than the accepted value. The permittivity of the vacuum, in turn, determines the speed c of light in the vacuum. Since the vacuum is at rest with respect to every inertial frame of reference, c is the same in every inertial reference frame. (shrink)