We are printing in its entirety the discussion document which sets out a code of professional conduct for nurses published by the Royal College of Nursing in November 1976 together with commentaries by the Assistant Secretary of the British Medical Association, a professor of nursing studies, student nurses and a lawyer. The image of the nurse is still that of one of Florence Nightingale's young ladies or of a member of a religious order who is wholly dedicated to caring (...) for the sick. Today, as this document and the comments upon it show, 'dedication' is still part of the motive which leads a man or woman to become a nurse but in addition, and this is where the public may be ignorant or choose to be ignorant, nursing offers a career where intellectual achievement and the satisfaction of a demanding job bring their proper financial reward and place in the professional community. We are grateful to the Royal College of Nursing for permission to publish this document. (shrink)

A code of ethics for the practice of nursing seeks to capture, in a written document, the normative values, ethical principles and standards of good care to guide nurses – qua moral agents. A codification of the accepted collective values of nursing can play a constitutional and directional role for the profession. It can further stimulate discussions about nursing that reflect the dynamic essence of the profession. Consequently, there is merit to continually reflecting on a code’s function and role especially (...) when a new or revised code is introduced to the nursing profession and the wider public such as the European Nursing Council’s Code of Ethics and Conduct for European Nursing. This paper examines codes of ethics in general and the European Nursing Council Code in particular using the framework of Gaumnitz and Lere. Although the European Nursing Council Code has all the ingredients of a contemporary professional ethics code, our position is that future iterations or addenda to this Code should be aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and take a more radical step in becoming an exemplar of a nursing code that can be a catalyst for the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals. (shrink)

Florence Nightingale on Society and Politics, Philosophy, Science, Education and Literature, Volume 5 in the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, is the main source of Nightingale’s work on the methodology of social science and her views on social reform. Here we see how she took her “call to service” into practice: by first learning how the laws of God’s world operate, one can then determine how to intervene for good. There is material on medical statistics, the census, (...) pauperism and Poor Law reform, the need for income security measures and better housing, on crime, gender and the family. Her comments on a new edition of The Dialogues of Plato are given, with their impact on the revision of the next edition. We see Nightingale’s condemnation of Plato’s “community of wives,” with her stirring approval of love (even outside marriage!), marriage and the family. In this volume also her views on natural science, education and literature are reported. Nightingale was an astute behind-the-scenes political activist. Society and Politics publishes (much of it for the first time) her correspondence with such leading political figures as Queen Victoria, W.E. Gladstone and J.S. Mill. There are notes and essays on public administration and personal observations on various members of royalty, prime ministers and ministers, and Indian viceroys. Nightingale’s support of the vote for women (contrary to much in the secondary literature) is here shown. Correspondence and notes on British general elections from 1834 to 1900 is reported, with letters to and for (Liberal) political candidates and fierce condemnations of Conservatives. Currently, Volumes 1 to 11 are available in e-book version by subscription or from university and college libraries through the following vendors: Canadian Electronic Library, Ebrary, MyiLibrary, and Netlibrary. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of PhilosophyAnthony J. CascardiGenres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy, by Andrea Wilson Nightingale; xiv & 222 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, $49.95 paper.That what we call “philosophy” may be a construct, contingent upon its social and historical circumstances and dependent upon its discursive elaboration in texts that have come to be accepted as authoritative, is a (...) possibility that seems increasingly plausible at the end of the twentieth century. To judge from recent debates over the “end of philosophy” there are few outside the discipline proper who would accept the procedures by which philosophy came to legitimize itself as an autonomous discourse. Philosophy as we know it now seems to be one discourse among many others equal to it, and its associated values (e.g., truth, authenticity, virtue) seem hard pressed to maintain their preeminence when faced with claims that there is no scale according to which all values can be ranked. In the tradition of Plato, Descartes, and Kant, however, philosophical values were bound up with the identity of philosophy as an autonomous discourse. Here, the disciplinary identity of philosophy was dependent upon the “purification” of its discourse: the separation of what is “philosophical” from what is not allowed philosophy to conduct its pursuit of wisdom above the flux of contingent events.How should we understand and evaluate twentieth-century claims about the contingency of philosophical discourse? The question may be approached in divergent ways. One, articulated from inside the discipline of philosophy, seeks to press on with the project of Plato, Descartes, and Kant in order to isolate and refine the language that is most transparent to the truth. According to this view, the claim that philosophy is constructed would be mistaken or confused, and in any case not a philosophical claim at all. Another approach, articulated from outside the discipline of philosophy proper, would be to map the discursive construction of philosophy in terms of the “ideological” interests at work in the very process of that construction, keeping in mind that what is “ideological” is always fashioned in some discursive way. While each of these approaches has something to recommend it, each is insufficient. Typically, the project of “purification” fails to reflect sufficiently upon the contingency of the discourse it aims to refine, while the project of ideology-critique typically fails to recognize its own implicit appeal to some notion of truth or authenticity—or, at the very least, of truths pursued in earnest and communicated intelligibly.Andrea Nightingale’s fine book on Plato and the “construct” of philosophy is everywhere responsive to the contingency of philosophical discourse. Nightingale deals with this contingency by inspecting Plato’s strategies through a lens that is at once social, historical, and discursive. Genres in Dialogue is likewise aware of the claims that Plato makes on behalf of the values of “truth” and “authenticity.” But Nightingale’s strategy is to deflect (philosophical?) questions about truth and authenticity in favor of an analysis that focuses on Plato’s [End Page 527] role in the inaugural configuration of what we have come to recognize and accept as philosophical discourse. Rather than concentrate on the later, ideological appropriation of philosophy in the West, Nightingale sets her sights on philosophy’s inaugural moment, when debates about truth and authenticity were first configured in relation to the question of different modes of speech, some of which attempted to assert their primacy over all others. On Nightingale’s very provocative account, philosophy is not something that became contingent with the passage of time; it was from the very start a discursive construct.Nightingale argues that procedures of this construction, evidenced principally in Plato’s dialogues, were unique. While recognizing that the Platonic dialogues were the staging ground for the rivalries between philosophy on the one hand and rhetoric and poetry on the other, her more important claim is that Plato incorporated a panoply of discursive genres into his texts, always in order to parody, subvert, or otherwise challenge their authority, the better to establish the primacy of philosophy as a discursive practice. What philosophy itself is goes largely unanswered by Plato. Instead... (shrink)

What are physical quantities, and in particular, what makes them quantitative? This book presents an original answer to this question through the novel position of substantival structuralism, arguing that quantitativeness is an irreducible feature of attributes, and quantitative attributes are best understood as substantival structured spaces.

The idea that immoral behaviour can sometimes be admirable, and that moral behaviour can sometimes be less than admirable, has led several of its supporters to infer that moral considerations are not always overriding, contrary to what has been traditionally maintained. In this paper I shall challenge this inference. My purpose in doing so is to expose and acknowledge something that has been inadequately appreciated, namely, the moral aspect of nonmoral goods and evils. I hope thereby to show that, even (...) if immorality can be admirable, this poses no threat to morality. (shrink)

The most distinctive and highly valued poems of the modern era offer an image of a dramatized "I" acting in a concrete setting. The variety and importance of the poems which fall under this description are suggested simply by the mention of such names as "Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard," "Tintern Abbey," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ulysses," "My Last Duchess," "Dover Beach," "The Windhover," "The Darkling Thrush," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," "The Love Song of J. (...) Alfred Prufrock," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The power and beauty of such poems seems intimately connected with the fact of their dramatic integrity and autonomy, and we have all been taught, in analyzing them, to refer to a "speaker" existing independent of the poet and to avoid the "intentional" and "biographical" fallacies which spuriously link the poem to the poet and the world outside the poem. Such an approach tends to undercut any notion that a poem has a single definite meaning, the meaning the poet gave it, and to support the idea that the meaning of a poem is indeterminate and/or multiple. All this is quite in accord with the orthodox critical doctrine that poetic language is differentiated from scientific language and preserved from competition with it by the fact that it is nonreferential, making no claim upon the real world; and complex, indefinite, and alogical, where scientific language is simple, definite, and logical. Ralph W. Rader is chairman of the department of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" , "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" , and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks" . Professor Rader's influential studies include Tennyson's "Maud": The Biography Genesis, "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson," and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-century Studies.". (shrink)

_The Foundations of Arithmetic_ is undoubtedly the best introduction to Frege's thought; it is here that Frege expounds the central notions of his philosophy, subjecting the views of his predecessors and contemporaries to devastating analysis. The book represents the first philosophically sound discussion of the concept of number in Western civilization. It profoundly influenced developments in the philosophy of mathematics and in general ontology.

There are, of course, many important differences between the deployment of cultural authority in the social context of second-century Christianity and that of twentieth-century academia. The editors of the Norton Anthology, for example, do not actively seek to suppress those voices which they exclude, nor are their principles for inclusion so narrowly defined as were the church fathers’. But the literary academy and its institutions developed from those of the Church and continue to wield a derivative, secular version of its (...) social and cultural authority. Since Matthew Arnold, the instutition of literature has been described in terms which liken its authority to that of religion, not only by outsiders—Woolf’s woman “divining the priest”—but by insiders who continue to employ the stances and language of religious authority; see, for instance, J. Hillis Miller’s credo in a recent issue of the ADE Bulletin: “I believe in the established canon of English and American literature and in the validity of the concept of privileged texts. I think it is more important to read Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton than to read Borges in translation, or even, to say the truth, to read Virginia Woolf.”9 Such rhetoric suggests that the religious resonances in literary texts are not entirely figurative, a point brought out strikingly by revisionary religious figures in feminist texts. In her recent essay “ ‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” Susan Gubar cites as some of the “many parables in an ongoing revisionary female theology” Florence Nightingale’s tentative prophecy that “the next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ,” H. D.’s blessed Lady carrying a “Bible of blank pages,” and Gertrude Stein’s celebration of The Mother of Us All.10 The revisionary female theology promoted in literary writing by women implicitly counters the patriarchal theology which is already inscribed in literature. The prophesied female Christ, blank Bible, and female Creator revise images familiar in the literary tradition, and, in contrast to earlier appropriations of religious imagery by Metaphysical, Pre-Raphaelite, and other poets, make visible the patriarchal preoccupations of literary “theology.” These voices, like the Gnostic voices recovered at Nag Hammadi, are only now being heard in chorus; and Pagels’ study of “the gnostic feminism” helps to illuminate some aspects of a cultural authority predicated on the suppression or domination of other voices. Christine Froula, associate professor of English at Yale University, is the author of A Guide to Ezra Pound’s “Selected Poems” and of the forthcoming “To Write Paradise”: Syle and Error in Pound’s Cantos. She is currently working on a book about literary authority in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. (shrink)

In recent years a novel picture of Mably's thought has begun to emerge within Anglo-American scholarship, suggesting perhaps a constructive alternative to both the �radical� and the �conservative� interpretations. On this reading, Mably should be seen as neither a proto-socialist nor a reactionary thinker, but as a republican -- a classical republican, in fact, whose writing represents a later Gallic contribution to the political tradition founded by Machiavelli and Harrington.3 In fact, nothing is more obvious to any reader than the (...) absolute centrality of the reference to Graeco-Roman antiquity in his writings, from beginning to end -- with precisely that celebration of the �mixed governments� of Sparta and Rome, and intense preoccupation with the politics of �virtue�, that we have come to associate with the civic humanist tradition. The object of this essay is to provide a brief introduction to this �new� Mably. It will do so chiefly through an examination of a single work, albeit a pivotal one in Mably's career. Entretiens de Phocion, a dialogue first published in 1763, introduced in print for the first time most of the major themes of his mature thought; and it remained by far the most popular work to appear in his lifetime. A brief look at it should give us the opportunity to test the cogency of the civic humanist reading of Mably's thought, as well as to suggest something of thespecific character of the French contribution to the �Atlantic republican tradition�. (shrink)

In his award-winning book _The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development_, J. N. Mohanty charted Husserl's philosophical development from the young man's earliest studies—informed by his work as a mathematician—to the publication of his _Ideas_ in 1913. In this welcome new volume, the author takes up the final decades of Husserl's life, addressing the work of his Freiburg period, from 1916 until his death in 1938. As in his earlier work, Mohanty here offers close readings of Husserl's main texts (...) accompanied by accurate summaries, informative commentaries, and original analyses. This book, along with its companion volume, completes the most up-to-date, well-informed, and comprehensive account ever written on Husserl's phenomenological philosophy and its development. (shrink)