Creating a single national health insurance pool is not likely to destabilize the economy by supplanting the private health insurance industry. This industry insures a relatively small percentage of the population and holds very little of the risk such insurance implies. In effect, insurance companies function as middlemen, bundling risk packages to distribute to other, larger companies and so serve a limited purpose. Were insurers to handle claims for a national pool as they do for the Medicare program, any destabilization (...) to the economy more broadly would be further minimized. (shrink)

Building on the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, literary critics, and feminist philosophers of science, the essays in Women Out of Place: the Gender of Agency and Race of Nationality investigate the linkages between agency and race for what they reveal about constructions of masculinity and femininity and patterns of domesticity among groups seeking to resist varied forms of political and economic domination through a subnational ideology of racial and cultural redemption. Does agency have a gender? Does nationality have a (...) race? Does the race of nationality predetermine the gender of agency? This volume asks these questions of a variety of nationalist ideologies, some at the same point in history, others as precursors of or predecessors to an initial nationalist formation. Contributors are: Richard G. Fox, Eva Haseby-Darvas, Paulette Pierce, Deborah Rubin, Louisa Schein, Carol A. Smith, Jacqueline True. (shrink)

This book explores the differences and similarities between Sartrean existentialism and French poststructuralism.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Much has been written in recent years on environmental ethics relating to the more general 'natural' environment but little specifically written about ethics of the built environment. Ethics and the Built Environment responds to this need and offers a debate on the ethical dimension of building in all its forms from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and approaches. This book should be of interest to architects, students of building and building design, environmentalists, politicians and general readers with an interest in (...) ethics. (shrink)

This article identifies a prevalent strand of feminist writing on beauty and aesthetic surgery and explores some of the contradictions and inconsistencies inscribed within it. In particular, we concentrate on three central feminist claims: that living in a misogynist culture produces aesthetic surgery as an issue predominantly concerning women; that pain - both physical and psychic - is a central conceptual frame through which aesthetic surgery should be viewed; and that aesthetic surgery is inherently a normalizing technology. Engaging with these (...) ‘myths’, we explore the tensions uncovered through a historical analysis of the practices of aesthetic surgery as well as the challenges to feminist claims offered by post-feminism. In particular we seek to destabilize the connection in feminist writing between beauty and passivity. We argue that through aesthetic references to denigrated black and working-class bodies, young women may mobilize aesthetic surgeries to reinscribe active sexuality on the feminine body. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction The Importance of Character Sympathy, the Indirect Passions, and Moral Sentiment Sympathy, Sentiment and Impartial Evaluation of Character The Errors of Remoteness and Countervailing Interest The Consequentialist Error The Authority of the Moral Sentiments Moral Knowledge as a Shared Resource Note References Further reading.

Among those sympathetic to Hume''smoral philosophy, a general consensus hasemerged that his first work on the topic,A Treatise of Human Nature, is his best. Hislater work, An Enquiry Concerning thePrinciples of Morals, is regarded as scaleddown in both scope and ambition. In contrastto this standard view, I argue that Hume''slater work offers a more sophisticated theoryof moral evaluation. I begin by reviewing theTreatise theory of moral evaluation tohighlight the reasons why commentators find socompelling Hume''s account of the corrections wemake to (...) our moral sentiments. The method isendorsed by philosophers such as Henry DavidAiken and Annette C. Baier because, theyallege, it shows that moral sentiments reflecta process of judgment that includes thepossibility of corrigibility and ofjustification. But Hume''s method of correctionfalls short and does not establish why thesentiments conforming to the standard of virtueshould count as moral judgments. In the secondEnquiry, Hume lays out a different set ofcriteria, including not only the need forcertain virtues of good judgment but attentionto the particular cultural and historicalorigins of the norms governing the virtues ofgood judgment. Hume''s attention to diversityin evaluative outlook in his more matureposition takes seriously the relation betweenmoral authority and public debate. (shrink)

In including a well-regulated pride among the virtues that are both useful and agreeable to oneself, Hume challenges not only theological, but also secular accounts that view pride as a vice. I examine Hume's evolving views on pride in relation to the secular view that regards pride as vicious. I suggest Hume's account of pride in his later moral philosophy has a new emphasis on dignity, and reflects a distinctively modern outlook on the role of humanity in evaluating virtue and (...) vice. (shrink)

“Only about 25 percent of the employees in child-care operations around the country have had professional training in dealing with children.”—_Newsweek_ This book is a proven, practical approach to providing that training at a minimum of expense and disruption of services. Written for trainers, it may profitably be used by any individual who wants to know more about positive methods for working with children. The information provided here has been used extensively to train child-care providers throughout Illinois. Covered in detail (...) are discipline, professionalism, child and adult communication, child development, observation, assessment, play, nutrition, health and safety, parent involvement and education, child abuse, developmental care, and organization of the environment. Illinois Governor James Thompson, former DCFS Director Gregory Coler, and DCFS Director Gordon Johnson have all endorsed these materials by continuing to recommend them for day-care training in Illinois. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Background for Hume's Views Beauty, Virtue, and the Double Association Beauty and Virtue as Powers of Producing Pleasure Beauty, Utility, and Sympathy Sympathy and the Standard of Virtue Beauty and Virtue in Hume's Later Philosophy The Standard of Taste More on Delicacy and the Pleasures of Beauty Beauty and Morality in “Of the Standard of Taste” References Further Reading.

Johns and Johnson analyze the invasion of Panama in order to explore the ways in which the War on Drugs has been used as an ideological justification for a projection of U.S. state power into Latin America. They characterize the Bush Administration's reasons for the invasion as cynical ideological rhetoric which covered up strategic interests the United States had in deposing Noriega and replacing him with a more cooperative regime. The authors particularly discuss the role of media coverage, including the (...) demonization of Noriega and the immediate adoption by the corporate media of the name Operation Just Cause, in legitimating the invasion and transforming it in popular ideology as a law enforcement operation. Finally, they examine the aftermath of the invasion in the United States--Bush's popularity ratings, the distortion of civilian casualty information, the macho celebration of the war--and in Panama--the destruction of the labor and independence movements, the puppet Endara government, and the increased drug trafficking through Panama. (shrink)

Friendship alters the moral demands and ideals that we live with. In this dissertation I examine precisely how those ideals must change if they are to accommodate the realities of friendship. I begin by surveying Aristotle, Kant, and Montaigne, and showing that each of those writers had useful insights into the way in which we reconceptualize the self when we become close friends with another person. I suggest that Kant and Montaigne were both right that we tend to merge our (...) identities with our friends. I then argue that if we value this sense of unity with our friends, certain changes must be made to common normative concepts. In particular, I argue that paternalistic intervention is more justified between friends than between strangers, because such intervention presupposes that the two individuals have a kind of shared autonomy. This presupposition is only true for friends, not for strangers. ;I further argue that the concept of respect must be reshaped if it is to be useful between friends. Kant noted that respect is a concept which distances people from one another, and such distance is not always appropriate between friends. I suggest that the notion of respect can be restructured so that it does not require distance and separation. Finally, I suggest that self-respect must also be restructured if the self is shared. (shrink)

Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939 offers a challenging new interpretation of pre-war physics at the University of Oxford, which was far more dynamic than most historians and physicists have been prepared to believe. It explains, on the one hand, how attempts to develop the University's Clarendon Laboratory by Robert Clifton, Professor of Experimental Philosophy from 1865 to 1915, were thwarted by academic politics and funding problems, and latterly by Clifton's idiosyncratic concern with precision instrumentation. Conversely, by examining in detail the work (...) of college fellows and their laboratories, the book reconstructs the decentralized environment that allowed physics to enter on a period of conspicuous vigour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially at the characteristically Oxonian intersections between physics, physical chemistry, mechanics, and mathematics. Whereas histories of Cambridge physics have tended to focus on the self-sustaining culture of the Cavendish Laboratory, it was Oxford's college-trained physicists who enabled the discipline to flourish in due course in university as well as college facilities, notably under the newly appointed professors, J. S. E. Townsend from 1900 and F. A. Lindemann from 1919. This broader perspective allows us to understand better the vitality with which physicists in Oxford responded to the demands of wartime research on radar and techniques relevant to atomic weapons and laid the foundations for the dramatic post-war expansion in teaching and research that has endowed Oxford with one of the largest and most dynamic schools of physics in the world. (shrink)

Claims: A. Shared assumption (1) needs to be modified. The argument of a restrictive quantifier phrase, QP, (at least when there is Inverse Scope) is a partial function defined only for individuals that satisfy the restrictor: (3'a) a. λP.[[book]] ⊆ P b.

The seventeenth century witnessed the first publications that argued for the equality of men and women. Desmond M. Clarke presents new translations of the three most important ones, with excerpts from the authors' related writings, together with an extensive introduction to the religious and philosophical context within which they argued.

Philosophers in eighteenth-century Britain had a keen interest in human nature, and made great strides in developing more scientific conceptions of human nature by borrowing and adapting the methods from natural history and natural philosophy. Human nature was analyzed at the level of the individual: how to cultivate a moral sense, or a more refined taste with respect to beauty. Even more attention was paid to the members of a society, and to the stages of development, especially in relation to (...) laws, government, and other social institutions. Entering a new economic age of prosperity, British thinkers focused on social progress in manners and conversational skills, as well as in the arts and sciences. This chapter examines these developments and the work of some of the most important proponents of the science of human nature. It concludes with some reflection on the legacies of the eighteenth-century views in Britain, Europe, and America. (shrink)