As a relative concept, privacy is difficult to define in universal terms. In the New Zealand setting recent legislation aims to protect patients’ privacy but anecdotal evidence suggests that these policies are not well understood by some providers and recipients of health care. This qualitative study set out to identify some of the issues by exploring former patients’ perceptions of privacy in shared hospital rooms. The findings suggest a conditional acceptance of a loss of privacy in an environment dictated by (...) architectural structure and by fiscal and time constraints. Participants indicated an awareness that personal information could be overheard and that their preference for a choice of setting for serious discussions was desirable. Some enjoyed the support offered in shared rooms, while, for others, overhearing another person’s health issues caused unnecessary distress. The participants suggested that knowing they could be overheard constrained information disclosure. This withholding of information has implications for health professionals’ ability to diagnose and treat patients appropriately. (shrink)

The simple question, what is empirical success? turns out to have a surprisingly complicated answer. We need to distinguish between meritorious fit and ‘fudged fit', which is akin to the distinction between prediction and accommodation. The final proposal is that empirical success emerges in a theory dependent way from the agreement of independent measurements of theoretically postulated quantities. Implications for realism and Bayesianism are discussed. ‡This paper was written when I was a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of (...) Science at the University of Pittsburgh; I thank everyone for their support. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

In his Memoir of Wittgenstein Professor Malcolm describes the occasion on which, as far as he knows, the idea that as an activity language is a game, or that ‘games are played with words’, first occurred to Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was passing a playing field where there was a game of football in progress. As he watched the game, the thought suddenly flashed into his mind, ‘We play games with words !’ This account may be compared with that given by (...) Professor von Wright, on the basis of Wittgenstein's own report, of the way in which he was with equal suddenness struck with the thought that a proposition is a ‘picture’. He was looking at a diagram which showed the positions of certain persons and vehicles involved in an accident—‘ That is a proposition!’ was the thought which on this earlier occasion darted into Wittgenstein's mind. Thus, it seems, was germinated the theory developed in the Tractatus that propositions, that is to say, meaningful propositions, are ‘pictures of reality’. (shrink)

In this volume we situate the future directions of feminist phenomenology in the here and now. We contend that in this moment feminist phenomenology is well positioned to take a leading role, not simply in terms of consolidating existing feminist methodologies but also in engaging the difficult task of thinking through the actual in the fullness of its relational, agential, ontological, experiential, and fleshly being, thereby opening up future possibilities. We also think there is some urgency to this claim. For (...) many, faith in the rational human subject has been shattered by the events of twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ worldwide conflicts and increasing sectarianism. The concept of the subject as such is either obsolete or needs to be dynamically rethought. The current options appear to include resuscitating the rational liberal subject or agent, acknowledging limited agency in the performativity of language and gesture, or recognizing the agency of matter. We want to argue instead for a feminist phenomenological approach that begins with multiple, meaningful points of view on relational being. (shrink)

Helen Fielding, in examining Yael Bartana’s video art works, in particular, Wild Seeds (2005), argues that politics seem to privilege the temporal, and video art thus lends itself to this enactment. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt, she concludes that the in-between, while a space and not a territory, is more a spacing, a taking place between people “no matter where they happen to be” than a place as such. In Bartana’s works, the temporal aspect of video allows her to open (...) up a time-space, or rather a spacing as a relation rather than a place. It is a spacing that takes place only when the art work sets to work in its engagement with viewers, that is, when the video is playing in a public space. Moreover, Bartana generally takes up temporally circumscribed events that are deeply embedded in the past, yet show up either disjuncture or parallels between national identity and individual embodied narratives. While national identity might rely upon fusion, Bartana’s videos upset that identity by opening up a spacing where identity can be questioned. Filming events such as a demonstration, an initiation into military weapons training, as well as play, her videos draw upon ritualized events that, in their repetition, are often meant to work performatively at a corporeal level to create a national and cultural unity. Her videos affectively and phenomenally draw the viewer into the corporeal experience of these rituals in order to show up the ruptures; indeed, they seem to suggest that it is at the level of the corporeal that this cohesion can both be effected and also undone. In other words, rather than focusing on national identity which is exclusive and hence spatial, corporeal being-with is temporal—the polis is figured as embodied intermittent relations or spacings rather than as an actual territory or space. -/- . (shrink)

This chapter is a study on Luce Irigaray’s engagement with Martin Heidegger’s approach to language. Although language is central to both thinkers, rather than privileging language in terms of the poëtic event of being, the arising of something out of itself, Irigaray reveals how language is privileged in terms of its promise of dialogue between two who are different. This difference provides for a limit to what can be known or recognized, as well as for a creative potentiality that is (...) directed towards the future. (shrink)

This chapter is a study on Luce Irigaray’s engagement with Martin Heidegger’s approach to language. Although language is central to both thinkers, rather than privileging language in terms of the poëtic event of being, the arising of something out of itself, Irigaray reveals how language is privileged in terms of its promise of dialogue between two who are different. This difference provides for a limit to what can be known or recognized, as well as for a creative potentiality that is (...) directed towards the future. (shrink)

When it comes to cheating in higher education, business school students have often been accused of being the worst offenders; if true, this may be a contributing factor in the kinds of fraud that have plagued the business community in recent years. We examined the issue of cheating in the business school by surveying 268 students in business and other professional schools on their attitudes about, and experiences with, cheating. We found that while business school students actually cheated no more (...) or less than students in other professional schools, their attitudes on what constitutes cheating are more lax than those of other professional school students. Additionally, we found that serious cheaters across all professional schools were more likely to be younger and have a lower grade point average. (shrink)

This chapter considers the ways in which whiteness as a skin color and ideology becomes a dominant level that sets the background against which all things, people and relations appear. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, it takes up a series of films by Bruce Nauman and Marlon Riggs to consider ways in which this level is phenomenally challenged providing insights into the embodiment of racialization.

Helen Fielding considers how the repetition of the same can be phenomenally shifted. Considering the phenomenon of death by suicide in response to cyberbullying, she asks how cyberspace as a system can be opened up and become more responsive to the living affect of young women subjected to abuse. At the heart of this problem is the breakdown of personal time into objective time, whereby the inexhaustible potentiality of the living world is collapsed into the indifferent infinity of the (...) possible that, unconnected to living existence, is ultimately a closed system. (shrink)

Irigaray turns to Merleau-Ponty's intuitions about the perception of color to develop her own insights into the creative emergence of sexuate identity. As a quality of the flesh, color cannot be reduced to formal codes. The privileging of word and text inherent to Western culture suppresses the coming into being of the embodied subject in his or her own situated context. Color, tied as it is to a corporeal creativity could provide an important link since it facilitates reflection, and a (...) re-enfleshing through color of a differentiated sexuate identity tied to the imagination as well as to genetic identity. (shrink)

The development of bioethics primarily at the cognitive level further perpetuates the tendency to construe all aspects of our lives, including our bodies, as technical systems. For example, if we consider the moral issue of organ sales without taking our embodiment into account, there appear to be no sound arguments for opposing such sales. However, it is important to consider the aspects of the phenomenal body that challenge rational deliberation by exploring an embodied approach to the ethical dilemma produced by (...) a proposed kidney exchange as presented in one of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog films. What is sought is a description of a body-measure that would serve as a critique of strictly cognitive bioethical deliberations. (shrink)

As we know, Merleau-Ponty was struggling with a dynamic shift in his thinking at the premature end of his life. In those last notes he raises the question of how to elaborate a phenomenology of “’the other world’, as the limit of a phenomenology of the imaginary and the ‘hidden’”—a phenomenology that would open onto an invisible life, community, other and culture. In her essay on “Eye and Mind”, “To Paint the Invisible”, Luce Irigaray argues that Merleau-Ponty was not yet (...) ready to address this question, of the limits posed to his vision by the presence of an other. The artworks of abstract expressionist artist Joan Mitchell are considered in the ways that they open up a different time-space suggesting an other world with which we intertwine without appropriation. Her works, I argue, defy reduction to essences, but also do not rely merely on sensation—for this reason they point in the direction of how to think phenomenology anew. For I do think Merleau-Ponty would be open to these conversations, to these other worlds and other visions. (shrink)

As we know, Merleau-Ponty was struggling with a dynamic shift in his thinking at the premature end of his life. In those last notes he raises the question of how to elaborate a phenomenology of “’the other world’, as the limit of a phenomenology of the imaginary and the ‘hidden’”—a phenomenology that would open onto an invisible life, community, other and culture (VI, Jan. 1960). In her essay on “Eye and Mind”, “To Paint the Invisible”, Luce Irigaray shows why Merleau-Ponty (...) was not yet ready to address this question, why he was not yet ready to engage the limits of his vision posed by the presence of an other. Against Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that the artist has no other task than to bring to appearance the world in the way he corporeally encounters it employing no “other technique than what his eyes and hands discover in seeing and painting”, Irigaray argues that the painter as phenomenologist then appropriates what is other to his vision without reflecting upon a limit to vision, as well as the limit provided by the invisible of an other, an other world. This is not to say that there are no intertwinings with this other, for there are other metabolisms with which we engage the world. Moreover, the sharing of vision with an other can alter the ways I see, challenging cultural complicity, rather than providing evidence that we share the same world. Irigaray is of course not the first to challenge a phenomenological approach to art and to vision—and here I turn specifically to Gilles Deleuze—who is critical of the phenomenological tendency to take on a world given to us by others. His artist, Francis Bacon, focuses on the sensation, which remains unmediated by narration or the feelings of others. Finally, the artworks of abstract expressionist artist Joan Mitchell are considered in the ways that they open up a different time-space; they suggest an other world with which we intertwine without appropriation. Her works, I argue, defy reduction to essences, but also do not rely merely on sensation—for this reason they point in the direction of how to think phenomenology anew. For I do think Merleau-Ponty would be open to these conversations, to these other worlds and other visions. (shrink)

Phenomenally strong artworks have the potential to anchor us in reality and to cultivate our perception. For the most part, we barely notice the world around us, as we are too often elsewhere, texting, coordinating schedules, planning ahead, navigating what needs to be done. This is the level of our age that shapes the ways we encounter things and others. In such a world it is no wonder we no longer trust our senses. But as feminists have long argued, thinking (...) grounded in embodied experience can be more open to difference; such embodied thinking helps us to resist the colonization of a singular, only seemingly neutral, perspective that closes down living potentialities. (shrink)

Distinguished feminist philosophers consider the future of feminist phenomenology and chart its political and ethical future in this forward-looking volume. Engaging with themes such as the historical trajectory of feminist phenomenology, ways of perceiving and making sense of the contemporary world, and the feminist body in health and ethics, these essays affirm the base of the discipline as well as open new theoretical spaces for work that bridges bioethics, social identity, physical ability, and the very nature and boundaries of the (...) female body. Entanglements with thinkers such as Arendt, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Deleuze are evident as they reveal new directions for productive philosophical work. Grounded in the richness of the feminist philosophical tradition, this lively volume represents a significant opening to the possible futures of feminist phenomenological research. (shrink)

In this essay, which is preceded by an interview with the translator, Luce Irigaray revisits her earlier critique of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of the visible, but also takes further her own thinking by drawing specifically on the issues raised within the context of painting and the creation of artworks. The focal point of her discussion is Merleau-Ponty’s essay on art, “Eye and Mind.”.

How do permanent artworks installed in public places shape the relations that take place around them? Drawing upon the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray I claim that two public artworks, Richard Serra’s Tilted Spheres (2002-2004) and a bronze casting of Louise Bourgeois’ Maman (1999) work to open up embodied being and to creatively transform reality. Serra’s work reveals an important aspect of public space, that of the space/time of the anonymous body, as well as the ways in which (...) a shared and hence relational embodied perception is necessary for dwelling. Bourgeois’ Maman reveals possibilities for helping us to think out what it might mean to share the same world even as we dwell in different worlds, in a space/time that we cultivate as our own. (shrink)

As people age their actions often become entrenched—we might say they are not open to the new; they are less able to adapt; they are stuck in a rut. Indeed, in The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse) Simone de Beauvoir writes that to be old is to be condemned neither to freedom nor to meaning, but rather to boredom (Beauvoir 1996, 461; 486). While in many ways a very pessimistic account of ageing, the text does provide promising moments where her (...) descriptions do capture other possibilities for aged existence. In particular, I turn to Beauvoir’s suggestion that habit can take on a “kind of poetry” since it merges past, present and future in a sense of eternity that the present moment now lacks with its limited futural horizon (468; 492). In this paper, I draw out, delineate, and further explore this phenomenological reconfiguration of the present that she gestures towards through a consideration of the intensification and modification of the present through habit. Drawing as well upon Merleau-Ponty’s insights into the phenomenal body, I argue that poetical habit is an active passivity that allows for the spontaneity of the new out of the sedimentation of corporeal memory, and for the attentive perception of what appears in the present. To disrupt someone’s habitual life is to unanchor that life from the world, from an identity shaped by repetition, by the constancy of a shared reality of things, that is, from the spatial-temporal process of inhabitation, and thus from her ability to engage with others and to disclose the world. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical insights provided by Anne Truitt's minimalist sculptures, as viewed through the phenomenological lenses of Hannah Arendt's investigations into the co-constitution of reality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's investigations into perception. Artworks in their material presence can lay out new ways of relating and perceiving. Truitt's works accomplish this task by revealing the interactive motion of our embodied relations and how material objects can actually help to ground our reality and hence human potentiality. Merleau-Ponty shows how our prereflective (...) bodies allow incompossible perceptions to coexist. Yet this same capacity of bodies to gather multiple perceptions together also lends itself to the illusion that we see from only one perspective. If an ethical perspective becomes reified into one position, it then becomes detached from reality, and the ethical potential is actually lost. At the same time, phenomenologically understood, the real world does not exist in terms of static matter, but is instead a web of contextual relations and meanings. An ethics that does not take embodied relations into account—that allows for only one perspective—ultimately loses its capacity for flexibility, and for being part of a common and shared reality. (shrink)

In order to open new possibilities for bioethics, I argue that we need to rethink our concept of nature. The established cognitive framework determines in advance how new technologies will become visible. Indeed, in this dualistic approach of metaphysics, nature is posited as limitless, as material endowed with force which causes us to lose the sense of nature as arising out of itself, of having limits, an end. In contrast, drawing upon the example of the gender assignment and construction of (...) intersexed infants, I want to suggest for bioethics an understanding of nature that arises not from our scientific explorations, but rather from attending to our situated perceptual encounters with the world which underlie such experimentation; these encounters are too easily overlooked, and yet they are crucial for opening up new ways of thinking. (shrink)

This paper brings Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to Sasha Waltz’s dance film S, which focuses on the relation between sexuality and language. Maintaining that movement in cinema takes place in the viewers and not the film, the paper considers how the visual can be deepened to include the ways we move and are moved. Saussure’s insights into language are brought to the sensible, which is here understood in terms of divergences from norms. Though film would seem to privilege vision, viewing this (...) film helps to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s claim that a film succeeds when it engages the viewer’s embodied understanding, and shifts the norms of the corporeal schema. (shrink)

I explore the possibility that the feminine, like art, can be thought in terms of Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the singular plural. In Les Muses, Nancy claims that art provides for the rethinking of a technë not ruled by instrumentality. Specifically, in rethinking aesthetics in terms of the debates laid out by Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, he resituates the ontological in terms of the specificity of the techniques of each particular artwork; each artwork establishes relations particular to its world or (...) worlds. What is at stake in the singular plural is the multiplicity of relations that are lost in the unifying gestures that arise out of radical oppositions. I rethink the singular plural through a phenomenological encounter with Barb Hunt’s artwork, Antipersonnel, a collection of hand-knitted replicas of antipersonnel landmines. (shrink)

In this study, we examine differences in cheating behaviors in higher education between two countries, namely the United States and the Czech Republic, which differ in many social, cultural and political aspects. We compare a recent (2011) Czech Republic survey of 291 students to that of 268 students in the US (Klein et al., 2007). For all items surveyed, CR students showed a higher propensity to engage in cheating. Additionally, we found more forms of serious cheating present in the Czech (...) sample. In all cases, the differences between the US and Czech samples were statistically significant. (shrink)

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the world’s leading causes of death due to infection and efforts to control TB would be substantially aided by the availability of an improved TB vaccine. There are currently nine new TB vaccines in clinical development, and the first efficacy trials are due to commence in 2009. There are many complex ethical issues which arise at all stages of TB vaccine development, from the need to conduct trials in developing countries to informed consent and the (...) process of ethical review. While it is important that these issues are discussed, it may also be timely to consider the challenges which may arise if a vaccine in clinical development proves to be highly effective. We examine a number of scenarios where decisions on the deployment of a new TB vaccine may impact on the rights and liberty of the individual. (shrink)

This chapter is an examination of the debate around essences in feminist philosophy and theorizing. Here, essences are rethought through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as carnal or embodied essences. As such, embodied essences are found at the joints, the hollows that are not inside us but that connect us, so that we are not isolated within cultural and historical zones. Embodied essences can be taken up in language as idealities.

What can one expect to unfold when they choose to do a face-to-face study of children on the farm and their use of space in rural southwestern Ontario? The process of getting the research off the ground from an ethics point of view was one where it was anything but normative, and to a large extent, a grueling process. This article situates the researcher’s dilemma and lays out the unfolding of the research process with reference to the Tri-Council Policy Statement (...) on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans and the major components found to trouble a research ethics board on a university campus. Last, academic freedom and the rights of researchers are considered in the context of undertaking the proposed research agenda. (shrink)

Helen Steward puts forward a radical critique of the foundations of contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that it relies too heavily on insecure assumptions about the sorts of things there are in the mind--events, processes, and states. She offers a fresh investigation of these three categories, clarifying the distinctions between them, and argues that the category of state has been very widely and seriously misunderstood.

Robert Koch discovered the causal agents for tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax. The 1905 Nobel Prize acknowledged Koch 's criteria for identifying the causal agent of an infectious disease. These criteria remain useful and the data reviewed below show that the cholinergic contributions to REM sleep control are confirmed by Koch 's postulates. [Hobson et al.].

Humean compatibilism is the combination of a Humean position on laws of nature and the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. This article's aim is to situate Humean compatibilism in the current debate among libertarians, traditional compatibilists, and semicompatibilists about free will. We argue that a Humean about laws can hold that there is a sense in which the laws of nature are 'up to us' and hence that the leading style of argument for incompatibilism?the consequence argument?has a (...) false premiss. We also display some striking similarities between Humean compatibilism and libertarianism, an incompatibilist view. For example, standard libertarians face a problem about luck, and we show that Humean compatibilists face a very similar problem. (shrink)

Much work performed under the banner of social epistemology still centers the problems of the individual cognitive agent. AU distinguishes multiple senses of "social," some of which are more social than others, and argues that different senses are at work in various contributions to social epistemology. Drawing on work in history and philosophy of science and addressing the literature on testimony and disagreement in particular, this paper argues for a more thoroughgoing approach in social epistemology.

The paper argues that actions should be thought of as processes and not events. A number of reasons are offered for thinking that the things that it is most plausible to suppose we are trying to cotton on to with the generic talk of ‘actions’ in which philosophy indulges cannot be events. A framework for thinking about the event-process distinction which can help us understand how we ought to think about the ontology of processes we need instead is then developed, (...) building on some excellent work already done by philosophers working at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. (shrink)

The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies is touted as ushering in the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). 4IR, also known as ‘Industry 4.0,’ pertains to the burning internet connectivity, sophisticated analytics and production, and automation’s transformative impacts on the world. The surge of change in the production arena started in the second half of 2010 and has continued to increase astronomically, with a remarkable probability of shaping the future of manufacturing and humanity. The 4IR is thus heralding (...) areas such as digitalisation, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, robotics, and 3D technologies amidst many other innovative digital technologies following the first, second and third industrial revolutions. The problem this paper addresses is the role of Arts and humanities (A&H) in the era of AI. Should A&H imbibe the empirical science methodology to stay relevant? How does A&H contribute to 4IR? Leveraging on philosophical tools of arguments and reconstruction of ideas, this paper argues for the significance of Kant’s thoughts in The Contest of the Faculties and that Arts and humanities are instrumental to humanising science and technology, helping to shape interdisciplinary collaboration and fostering understanding of the ethical, social and cultural dimensions of AI. (shrink)

This article highlights a contemporary privacy problem that falls outside the scope of dominant theoretical approaches. Although these approaches emphasize the connection between privacy and a protected personal (or intimate) sphere, many individuals perceive a threat to privacy in the widespread collection of information even in realms normally considered "public". In identifying and describing the problem of privacy in public, this article is preliminary work in a larger effort to map out future theoretical directions.

ON DECEMBER 10, 1991 Charles Shonubi, a Nigerian citizen but a resident of the USA, was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport for the importation of heroin into the United States.1 Shonubi's modus operandi was ``balloon swallowing.'' That is, heroin was mixed with another substance to form a paste and this paste was sealed in balloons which were then swallowed. The idea was that once the illegal substance was safely inside the USA, the smuggler would pass the balloons and (...) recover the heroin. On the date of his arrest, Shonubi was found to have swallowed 103 balloons containing a total of 427.4 grams of heroin. There was little doubt about Shonubi's guilt. In fact, there was considerable evidence that he had made at least seven prior heroin-smuggling trips to the USA (although he was not tried for these). In October 1992 Shonubi was convicted in a United States District Court for possessing and importing heroin. Although the conviction was only for crimes associated with Shonubi's arrest date of December 10, 1991, the sentencing judge, Jack B. Weinstein, also made a ®nding that Shonubi had indeed made seven prior drug-smuggling trips to the USA. The interesting part of this case was in the sentencing. According to the federal sentencing guidelines, the sentence in cases such as this should depend on the total quantity of heroin involved. This instruction was interpreted rather broadly.. (shrink)

With the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) to healthcare, there is also a need for professional guidance to support its use. New (2022) reports from National Health Service AI Lab & Health Education England focus on healthcare workers’ understanding and confidence in AI clinical decision support systems (AI-CDDSs), and are concerned with developing trust in, and the trustworthiness of these systems. While they offer guidance to aid developers and purchasers of such systems, they offer little specific guidance for the clinical (...) users who will be required to use them in patient care. This paper argues that clinical, professional and reputational safety will be risked if this deficit of professional guidance for clinical users of AI-CDDSs is not redressed. We argue it is not enough to develop training for clinical users without first establishing professional guidance regarding the rights and expectations of clinical users. We conclude with a call to action for clinical regulators: to unite to draft guidance for users of AI-CDDS that helps manage clinical, professional and reputational risks. We further suggest that this exercise offers an opportunity to address fundamental issues in the use of AI-CDDSs; regarding, for example, the fair burden of responsibility for outcomes. (shrink)