Advances in our understanding of appraisal processes and emotion regulation have been two of the most important contributions of research on cognition and emotion in recent decades. Interestingly, however, progress in these two areas has been less mutually informative than one might expect or desire. To help remedy this situation, we provide an integration of appraisal theory and the process model of emotion regulation by describing parallel, interacting and iterative systems for emotion generation and emotion regulation. Outputs of the emotion (...) generation system are perceived by the emotion regulation system, and emotion regulation strategies then modulate emotion by intervening at specific stages of the emotion generation system, ultimately changing appraisal dimensions. We hope that our unified perspective will encourage and guide future research at the interface of cognition and emotion. (shrink)

In Moody Minds Distempered philosopher Jennifer Radden assembles several decades of her research on melancholy and depression. The chapters are ordered into three categories: those about intellectual and medical history of melancholy and depression; those that emphasize aspects of the moral, psychological and medical features of these concepts; and finally, those that explore the sad and apprehensive mood states long associated with melancholy and depressive subjectivity. A newly written introduction maps the conceptual landscape, and draws out the analytic and (...) thematic interconnections between the chapters. Radden emphasizes and develops several new themes: the implications, theoretical phenomenological and moral, of recognizing melancholy and depressive states as mood states; questions of method, as they affect how we understand and characterize claims about melancholy and depression; and the persistence and force of cultural tropes linking such states to brilliance, creativity, and sagacity. Insights from literature and the history of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry are woven together with those from the more recent disciplines of feminist theory and cultural studies. This is interdisciplinary writing at its best-part analytic philosophy, and part history of ideas. (shrink)

Since 1997 there has been a significant increase in the number and percentage of Kansas farmers who are women. Using Reskin and Roos’ model of “job queues and gender queues” I analyze changes in the agricultural industry in Kansas that resulted in more women becoming “principal farm operators” in the state. I find there are three changes largely responsible for women increasing their representation in the occupation: an increase in the demand for niche products, a decrease in the average farm (...) size, and greater societal acceptance of women as farmers. This study adds to the growing literature on women principal farm operators in developed countries, and is among the first to explore why women are becoming a larger percentage of the occupation in the United States. (shrink)

Political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) calls for firms to implement and engage in deliberative democracy processes and structures, addressing governance gaps where governments are unwilling or unable to do so. However, an underlying assumption that the implementation of PCSR will enrich democratic processes in society has been exposed and challenged. In this conceptual article, we explore this challenge by developing a framework to reveal the dynamics of firms’ deliberative democratic processes and structures (meso level), and those at nation state (macro (...) level). Using existing cases as illustrative examples, we demonstrate that despite the public good premise of PCSR theory toward thickening the overall democracy in a society, corporate democratization at meso level can have the opposite effect and may actually erode macro-level democratic control of society and the economy. These findings imply a need for multilevel analysis in PCSR research and greater consideration of state-level public institutions and the responsibilities of business firms toward those institutions. Furthermore, we contribute to the PCSR literature by identifying the disruptive mechanisms associated with these dynamics and outline two alternative perspectives to allow firms to continue to take on political responsibilities. (shrink)

Categorical perception (CP) refers to how similar things look different depending on whether they are classified as the same category. Many studies demonstrate that adult humans show CP for human emotional faces. It is widely debated whether the effect can be accounted for solely by perceptual differences (structural differences among emotional faces) or whether additional perceiver-based conceptual knowledge is required. In this review, I discuss the phenomenon of CP and key studies showing CP for emotional faces. I then discuss a (...) new model of emotion which highlights how perceptual and conceptual knowledge interact to explain how people see discrete emotions in others’ faces. In doing so, I discuss how language (emotion words included in the paradigm) contribute to CP. (shrink)

Contingent transcranialists claim that the physical mechanisms of mind are not exclusively intracranial and that genuine cognitive systems can extend into cognizers' physical and socio-cultural environments. They further claim that extended cognitive systems must include the deep functional integration of external environmental resources with internal neural resources. They have found it difficult, however, to explicate the precise nature of such deep functional integration and provide compelling examples of it. Contingent intracranialists deny that extracranial resources can be components of genuine extended (...) cognitive systems. They claim that transcranialists fallaciously conflate coupling with constitution and construe cognition as extending always from brains into world rather than world into brains. By using insights from recent research in developmental psychology and by explicating the nature of one form that deep functional integration can take, I argue that (i) transcranialists do not fallaciously conflate coupling wth constitution, and (ii) human emotional ontogenesis is a world-to-brain transcranial achievement. Jennifer Greenwood is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics, University of Queensland. (shrink)

This book explores Hume's concern with the destructiveness of religious factions and his efforts to develop, in his moral philosophy, a solution to factional conflict. Sympathy and the related capacity to enter into foreign points of view are crucial to the neutralization of religious zeal and the naturalization of ethics. Jennifer Herdt suggests that Hume's preoccupation with religious faction is the key which reveals the unity of his varied philosophical, aesthetic, political and historical works.

This volume argues that educational problems have their basis in an ideology of binary opposites often referred to as dualism, and that it is partly because mainstream schooling incorporates dualism that it is unable to facilitate the thinking skills, dispositions and understandings necessary for autonomy, democratic citizenship and leading a meaningful life. Bleazby proposes an approach to schooling termed social reconstruction learning, in which students engage in philosophical inquiries with members of their community in order to reconstruct real social problems, (...) arguing that this pedagogy can better facilitate independent thinking, imaginativeness, emotional intelligence, autonomy, and active citizenship. (shrink)

Returning to John P. Reeder's 1978 essay on “Religious Ethics as a Field and Discipline,” this essay explores debates surrounding the original intentions for the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) and for the field of religious ethics, as these have played out over the decades among an influential group of scholars involved with the JRE since its inception: Arthur Dyck, Ronald Green, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jeffrey Stout. While the JRE and its founding mission are in need of ongoing critique and (...) transformation, we might well still affirm the journal's ongoing importance as a site for the negotiation of a commons, the identification of possibilities for shared life, imagined beyond exclusion and domination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.1 (2003) 57-62 [Access article in PDF] Listening to People Or Listening to Prozac?Another Consideration of Causal Classifications Jennifer Hansen Keywords causal classification, descriptivism, melancholia, neurasthenia, depression, cultural relativism. The shape and detail of depression have gone through a thousand cartwheels, and the treatment of depression has alternated between the ridiculous and the sublime, but the excessive sleeping, inadequate eating, suicidiality, withdrawal from social (...) interaction, and relentless despair are all as old as the hill tribes, if not as old as the hills. In the years since man achieved the capacity for self-reference, shame has come and gone; treatments for bodily complaints have alternated and crossed with treatments for spiritual ones; pleas to external gods have echoed pleas to internal demons. To understand the history of depression is to understand the invention of human being as we now know and are him. Our Prozac-popping, cognitively focused, semi-alienated postmodernity is only a stage in the ongoing understanding and control of mood and character. (Solomon 2001, 286) ALTHOUGH ANDREW SOLOMON clearly believes that "the shape and detail of depression have gone through a thousand cartwheels," Jennifer Radden gives us pause before assuming that depression is just another name for Dame Melancholy. Solomon's claim depends on a deeper metaphysical claim about the nature of depression and its causes. The current method of psychiatric nosology, descriptivism, does not necessarily support equating melancholia and depression. Furthermore, it appears that adopting descriptivism as the sole method of classifying mental disorders commits us to cultural relativist psychiatry. Below I reconsider whether we want to rule out causal classifications and suggest that embracing both descriptivism and causal classifications offer us greater possibilities in understanding human illness and culture.Although the occasion for Jennifer Radden's essay is to investigate whether or not melancholia and depression refer to the same thing, her essay detours into a consideration of extra-descriptivist models of psychiatric illness versus the descriptivism of current psychiatric nosology. This detour turns out to be warranted; her purely academic question yields to a timelier question concerning the proper methodology for classifying mental disorders. Whereas debates about psychiatric nosology are perennial, the recent success of the new generation of antidepressants [End Page 57] is reviving biological psychiatry and its search for the neurochemical origins of depression. Hence, embedded in Radden's question concerning whether or not melancholia is the same thing as clinical depression, is another important question concerning the causes of mental illness, particularly depression.Currently, with its descriptivist approach, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) does not classify mental illness, such as clinical depression, based on underlying causes. The cluster of symptoms and behavioral signs that lead a clinician to diagnose one as depressed that are contained in either the DSM or the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) may be too fuzzy or elusive to give any clear distinction between major depression, mild depression, and the blues. For example, one group of epidemiologists points out that [t]he DSM-III, DSM-III-R, and DSM-IV acknowledge that depression, like many mental disorders, has no currently obvious natural classes... If natural classes of depression exist, then their nosology awaits the discovery of distinct and reliable genetic, biological, clinical, or other predictors of risk, severity, or clinical course. Clinicians have a tradition of separating depressions into subtypes; however, this subtyping has not yet led to clear-cut delineations of syndromes in populations. (Kaelber 1995, 4) The evidence is still insufficient to establish the biological or psychological origins of depression. Although many theories exist that explain why people become depressed, scientifically we are not yet in a position to determine which is the right theory. From a pragmatic perspective, however, whether or not we know what causes depression, we can nonetheless attempt to alleviate suffering from depression. And it is with this goal in mind that the DSM-IV and ICD-10 classify mental disorders.Now, given that our current methodology for psychiatric nosology does not establish causes, it is also insufficient for determining what... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Animadversions:Tekhne After Capital/Life After WorkJennifer Bajorek (bio)The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary moment of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats.—Karl Marx, Capital1For a long time we have been used to thinking the relation, on the one hand, between language and tekhne and, on the other, between capital and the technical or technological. And yet, for (...) all the parallels that might be drawn between these two projects, it seems to me quite clear that they remain to be articulated in a way that does justice to either one. It is, moreover, entirely symptomatic of the failure of this articulation that almost all the parallels that have been drawn, in decades past, between capital and language—in the name of "political economies of the sign," for example, or of "symbolic economies"2—have been drawn without regard, precisely, to technical implications, and thus to the implication of capital and of language in and by the technical.What we might call, for purposes of exposition, the missing link—the term that would make this articulation possible—is, I will argue, labor and therefore, by extension, life. That this extension can be made with reference to Marx is by now axiomatic. Wasn't the point of all the charges of "economic determinism" and "class reductionism" that there is, in the end, "more to life" than work? That this extension must be made with reference to Marx is, however, a very different proposition and one that deserves a closer look. How does the notion that, for Marx, labor and life are coextensive stand up to close reading of his text?I shall begin with a fairly programmatic exposition of what I call Marx's two codefinitions of labor in Capital, the first being his definition of labor as a function of the human, the second being his definition of labor as a function of the living body. Each definition is a codefinition insofar as its converse is also true—insofar as, for Marx, the humanity of man and the life of his body are each, in turn, a function of work. [End Page 42] We will be surprised to find that these codefinitions are not equivalent, nor even necessarily consistent, and that the trajectory described by Marx's text is actually that of a radical divergence of humanity and life, whose consequences are serious, I will suggest, not only for any alleged "humanism" of Marx, but for the assumption that can be found almost everywhere—still, today—of an essential humanism of politics. At the same time, a more precise understanding of the labor-life relation we find in Marx, and of the concept of productivity that underwrites it, will give us some first indications as to why politics must of necessity pass through technics, as well as, therefore, through an essentially capitalist—or, at the very least, capitalizing—moment.1Codefinition (the Original Human Instrument)For the Marx of Capital, what distinguishes "man" from animal and, at the same time, defines labor is at least in part what we might call ideation. The essence of man is not simply that he effects a change of form in the materials of nature with the aim of fulfilling his needs—for animals do this, and some apparently more effectively than man—but rather that he is able to form an idea of those needs, and so to project or imagine their fulfillment. Thus Marx writes:A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his head before he builds it in wax. At the end of every labor process emerges a result which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, and so already existed in ideal form.[Capital 1: 284]3Conversely, the essence of labor is that it is something human: the mediation, by way of an exertion of force, of the "material... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Of Ouija Boards and Bar Owners1 Bad Reasons for Condemning Tattoos Some Moral Compliments My Complaint Traditional Virtue Ethics Virtue Ethics and Tattoos Tough Tattoos … What Lies Beneath.

Bedbugs are tiny, wingless insects which feed on mammal blood and leave behind painful, itchy sores. Although they can live in other settings, they are most commonly found in warm, dark places inhabited by humans, like beds. After being absent in the United States for over 60 years, thanks to powerful pesticides, bed bugs, have returned in force and are present in every state and nearly every city. For reasons not entirely understood, bed bugs have developed resistance to traditional pesticides (...) such as Permethrin and are therefore difficult to control. Although commonly believed to be associated with dirty housekeeping and associated with substandard housing, bed bugs are equally likely to be present in five-star hotels as they are in homeless shelters. (shrink)

The future of biomedical and scientific research in the United States is inextricably attached to the universities and academic medical centers funded by the government. And the work many of us do commenting on ethical issues arising from that funded research is dependent on its continuation. Yet the institutions of higher education and the academic medical centers where this federally funded research takes place are under attack on many fronts. What would the world look like without federally supported research universities? (...) It is likely that the number of institutions doing funded research would drop dramatically, perhaps to the one hundred or so institutions that already receive the vast majority of funding. (shrink)

This essay surveys the theme of solidarity in the respective works of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt. Recent discourses in continental political philosophy have arrived at an impasse regarding solidarity. On the one hand, solidarities are important for galvanizing historically oppressed peoples against dominant discourses. On the other hand, solidarities that impose similarities in advance run the risk of absorbing difference and becoming exclusionary. Gadamer and Arendt, each in different manners, promise a distinctive approach to discourses on solidarity through their (...) emphasis on the existential concern for human finitude. Both suggest that insofar as we are finite, we are bound together not by familiarity and sameness but rather by shared vulnerability, finding help with this vulnerability by remaining open to the difference and otherness that is always at stake in communal life. In this, Gadamer and Arendt open new paths to theorizing collectives in ways that embrace and defend difference rather than rejecting it. Moreover, both remind us of the urgency of such a notion of solidarity for responding to what, in allusion to Arendt, we may be inclined to call the dark times in which we live. (shrink)

Economists often consult multiple models in order to combat model uncertainty in the face of misspecification. By examining modeling practices at the Bank of England, this paper identifies an important, but underappreciated modeling procedure. Sometimes an idealized model is manipulated to reproduce the results from another distinct auxiliary model, ones which it could not produce on its own. However, this procedure does not involve making the original model “more realistic,” insofar as this means adding in additional causal factors. This suggests (...) that there are ways to make models more representationally adequate that do not involve de-idealization in the straightforward sense. (shrink)

Insofar as lyric has been conceptualized as the subjective genre of poetry—invested in inner processes and states of feeling and thought in distinction to epic’s investment in external action—critical interest has revolved around the lyric I and especially questions of apostrophe and address. The implications of this investment range from Marxist critiques of lyric and bourgeois individuality to theoretical debates about the relation between the historical and lyric subject. What would it mean, however, to consider the presence of a lyric (...) it? In this essay I consider how it can disclose a diverse set of lyric conventions—conventions that begin at the intersection of grammar and rhetoric but come to bear on larger philosophical and literary questions. Rather than defining it, poets often withhold its meaning, mining the hyperflexibility of the pronoun, its ability to be referential or dummy, context-dependent or not. Poets do this to make affective claims on their reader. At the same time, it can track a process in which lyric speakers attempt to get outside themselves to grasp their own subjectivity. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Today the majority of philosophers in the English-speaking world adhere to the “naturalist” credos that philosophy is continuous with science, and that the natural sciences provide a complete account of all that exists—whether human or nonhuman. The new faith says science, not man, is the measure of all things. However, there is a growing skepticism about the adequacy of this complacent orthodoxy. This volume presents a group of leading thinkers who criticize scientific naturalism not in the name of (...) some form of supernaturalism, but in order to defend a more inclusive or liberal naturalism. The many prominent Anglo-American philosophers appearing in this book—Akeel Bilgrami, Stanley Cavell, Donald Davidson, John Dupré, Jennifer Hornsby, Erin Kelly, John McDowell, Huw Price, Hilary Putnam, Carol Rovane, Barry Stroud, and Stephen White—do not march in lockstep, yet their contributions demonstrate mutual affinities and various unifying themes. Instead of attempting to force human nature into a restricted scientific image of the world, these papers represent an attempt to place human nature at the center of renewed—but still scientifically respectful—conceptions of philosophy and nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.1 (2005) 59-61 [Access article in PDF] Space and Normativity Jennifer Church Keywords space, normativity, reasons, unconscious I appreciate the thoughtful criticisms and helpful suggestions of my commentators. In this brief reply, I can only begin to address the many interesting issues that they raise.I am not sure whether R.D. Hinshelwood views my paper as operating within the constraints of analytic philosophy, which he (...) equates with "rationalist" philosophy and traces back to Aristotle, or as moving beyond those boundaries. Three initial remarks may help to situate my position. (1) My paper is in the analytic tradition insofar as it is an attempt to articulate the constitutive structure of concepts that are especially interesting and fundamental, where such articulation may or may not lead to conceptual revision. (2) My particular focus is on the concept of reason, with the aim of thinking through its appropriate use with respect to unconscious thought and the emotions; implicit in this project is the assumption that there are some things that should not be explained by appeal to reasons. (3) I wish to show how some peculiarities surrounding the attribution of unconscious reasons and emotional reasons can be understood by reference to spatial reasoning rather than reasoning that is more linguistic in character.Hinshelwood sympathizes with my attempt to describe a kind of reasoning that is not "rationalist" insofar as it does not rely on the manipulation of symbols and, indeed, tends to ignore the distinction between symbol and thing. He agrees that there is something spatial about such ways of reasoning. But Hinshelwood argues that more needs to be said to establish a connection between the spatial maneuverings of animals and the nonpropositional thinking of humans. He thinks that "psychoanalysis can in effect fill in the gap in Church's argument with a developmental argument" (2005, 47). The developmental account he has in mind is based on Freud's description of how an infant who automatically tries to ingest what feels good and excrete what feels bad will also come to introject (i.e., to imagine ingesting) what seems good and eject (i.e., imagine excreting) what seems bad. In the words of Hinshelwood, this is a hypothesis about how "bodily space becomes psychic space, and emerges in the sense of having a mind" (2005, 47). I am sympathetic to this account of how we acquire a sense of having a mind, but I do not think that we need to have a sense of having a mind in order to have a mind. A cat can have beliefs and desires (and can have the normative experience of having taken the wrong turn) without ever imagining an inner space with mental contents. Likewise, a cat can experience anger or fear in virtue of experiencing certain changes within its body despite having no experience of its mind as such. In short, I view an account of introjection as an important contribution to developmental psychology, but I think it comes [End Page 59] after, not before, an account of unconscious and emotional reasons.Gerrit Glas maintains that my attempt to ground the normativity of unconscious reasoning (or spatial reasoning) in the feeling of 'getting it right' versus getting it wrong' runs afoul of this dilemma: either (a) the normativity of unconscious reasoning ends up very much like the normativity of conscious reasoning, and the needed normativity is already built into the feeling that I appeal to, or (b) the normativity of unconscious reasoning is reduced to physical sensations and is no longer normative at all. I do not view this as a dilemma because I embrace option (a). I agree that the feel of being on the right track is much the same, whether or not we can say what that track is, let alone why it is right rather than wrong. Likewise, it feels the same to realize that I have made a wrong turn, whether or not I know what the wrong turn was. Also, I agree that normativity is implicit in the feel of getting it right. I am not appealing to such a feeling... (shrink)

Because of historical mistreatment of ethnic minorities by research and medical institutions, it is particularly important for researchers to be mindful of ethical issues that arise when conducting research with ethnic minority populations. In this article, we focus on the ethical issues related to the inclusion of ethnic minorities in clinical trials of psychosocial treatments. We highlight 2 factors, skepticism and mistrust by ethnic minorities about research and current inequities in the mental health care system, that researchers should consider when (...) developing psychosocial interventions studies that include ethnic minorities. (shrink)

In this paper, I write about nurses of colour who have made significant contributions to nursing, yet are actively ignored in traditional nursing textbooks related to colonized thinking. One consequence of this is that when we think about comparing the disparities of the past to the present day, we see that we have not made much of a difference. The disparity is still huge. I call on all of us as nurses to challenge ourselves to think beyond the box of (...) colonized thought to what we know is true. (shrink)

Ethics networks have emerged over the last few decades as a mechanism for individuals and institutions over various regions, cities and states to converge on healthcare-related ethical issues. However, little is known about the development and nature of such networks. In an effort to fill the gap in the knowledge about such networks, a survey was conducted that evaluated the organizational structure, missions and functions, as well as the outcomes/products of ethics networks across the country. Eighteen established bioethics networks were (...) identified via consensus of three search processes and were approached for participation. The participants completed a survey developed for the purposes of this study and distributed via SurveyMonkey. Responses were obtained from 10 of the 18 identified and approached networks regarding topic areas of: Network Composition and Catchment Areas; Network Funding and Expenses; Personnel; Services; and Missions and Accomplishments. Bioethics networks are designed primarily to bring ethics education and support to professionals and hospitals. They do so over specifically defined areas—states, regions, or communities—and each is concerned about how to stay financially healthy. At the same time, the networks work off different organizational models, either as stand-alone organizations or as entities within existing organizational structures. (shrink)

This article maps out a pedagogical juncture of bell hooks's feminist theory of homeplace (hooks 2007) and Indigenous maternal pedagogies as liberatory praxis through a journey with Indigenous women's literatures. I position this work as a response to the call to transform feminist theorizing through Indigenous philosophies as articulated in a recent Hypatia special issue (Bardwell-Jones and McLaren 2020, 2). The article documents hooks's theory of homeplace as a space of resistance and renewal and shares insights into Indigenous experiences of (...) homeplace within historical and contemporary contexts of genocide, and the ongoing racialized and sexualized violence on Turtle Island. I discuss finding homeplace in Indigenous literatures by sharing a genealogy of Indigenous women's literatures as theorizing tools for engaging social change within academic spaces. To bring this work full circle, I offer Indigenous perspectives of homeplace, and the lessons gleaned from Indigenous women's literatures, as intentional work toward imagining Indigenous futurities. Indeed, connecting this work with liberatory pedagogical praxis imagines a site to establish homeplace in academic settings and empower students to engage in the kind of work that fosters and calls for safer homes, schools, and communities. (shrink)

This paper analyses the forgotten concept of “sperm-force” proposed by George Newport (1803–1854). Newport is known for his comprehensive microscopic examinations of sperm and egg interaction in amphibian fertilization between 1850 and 1854. My work with archival sources reveals that Newport believed fertilization was caused by sperm-force, which the Royal Society refused to publish. My reconstruction chronologically traces the philosophical and experimental origins of sperm-force to Newport’s 1830s entomological work. Sperm-force is a remnant of Newport’s speculations on the creation of (...) the active individual. I argue that sperm-force was rooted in British interpretations of German _Naturphilosophie_, which demonstrates Continental influences on mid-Victorian embryology, particularly the role of male generative power. This context provides further evidence that British versions of Romantic science fostered sophisticated experimental work. The refusal by Paleyite stalwarts of natural theology to publish Newport’s ideas illustrates the institutional resistance to German pantheistic and vitalistic influences. This reconstruction of sperm-force’s philosophical foundation and its reception offers new understandings of mid-Victorian attitudes toward the inheritance of mind and body. It situates Newport’s work within the nineteenth century’s scientific project to assign stereotypical genders to the gametes. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Stepping on the Mat The Exploration of Yoga It's All a Matter of Perspective The Birth of Yoga What does ‘Divine’ Mean to You? A New Era Begins… What Goes Up Must Come Down A Shift in Perspective The Father of Modern Yoga The Cycle Repeats Itself How Yoga Won the West.

In a 2003 Science article, Eric Juengst and colleagues asserted, “NIH [National Institutes of Health] has a responsibility to help society respond to the implications of antiaging research for whic...

The principle of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) conceives of a broad set of measures that can be employed in preventing and responding to atrocity crimes. Nevertheless, the UN Security Council remains an important part of the implementation architecture, given what the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty referred to as its authoritative position in international society as the “linchpin of order and stability.” As part of the roundtable “The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: Twenty Years (...) since Its Inception,” this review of the Council's role in fulfilling its responsibility to protect advances two somewhat contrasting arguments about the original ICISS report. First, it suggests that the commissioners may have underestimated the Council's potential contribution, by concentrating on the authorization of coercive means to address crises of human protection. Over the past two decades, the Security Council has not only employed various diplomatic, political, and humanitarian measures to address atrocity crimes but also adjusted the purposes and practices of peace operations to advance protection goals and more subtly shaped discourses and expectations about state responsibilities for protection. However, I also argue that the willingness of the ICISS to identify potential alternatives to the Security Council when its members are paralyzed appears in retrospect to have been both bold and forward looking, in light of the Council's failures to act in a timely and decisive manner to protect amid crises and the contemporary realities of geopolitical rivalry. The article concludes by suggesting that future efforts to protect populations from atrocity crimes should focus not only on the herculean task of trying to change the behavior of P5 members of the Council but also on encouraging a new institutional balance between the Security Council and other intergovernmental bodies. (shrink)

This book considers the significance of this confluence through an examination of myths in the writings of H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert. Presenting fresh insights into their works, the author brings to light the tendency of science fiction narratives to reaffirm spiritual myths.

This book is a must read for anyone who cares about the place of technology in our lives.

Under normal circumstances the church would function as an agent of change and transformation, but this article focuses on the church herself that needs radical change if she is to remain relevant in mission and ministry in this current era. Clericalism and the centralisation of hierarchical control can be identified as the root causes of institutional pathology and weakening collegiality. To address clericalism may require the adjustment of seminary training, as in the current system seminarians are nurtured in a sense (...) of separateness, promoting male-ego and feed gender exclusivity and doctrinal self-righteousness. While the seminary was once an instrument of reform in the Catholic Church, established to counter problems such as clerical concubinage and illiteracy, but now it is no longer suitable as it has become the forum that breeds other problems. Priority attention should be paid to purge the church of rampant clericalism, discriminatory scapegoating of gay persons, marginalisation of free thinkers, exclusion of women priests, the perceived moral laxity of family life issues and reception of communion by divorced Catholics without the benefits of annulment. Discrediting the personal authority of the pope is hardly an enlightened option. What ought to be transformed is the centralisation of control and allowing increased localised dominion whereby crises such as sexual abuse scandals could be addressed and solved more speedily and liberally, and limit the need to go to the top for solutions. To wait for centralised, hierarchal structures to deal with urgent issues is not desirable, as speedy accountability is needed to address issues that hurt the church in its entirety. (shrink)

This commentary on “Her Own Decision: Impairment and Authenticity in Adolescence” by Campbell, Derrington, Hester, and Lew adds further consideration of obligations for guardians and physicians of minors who struggle in making serious decisions regarding medical treatment.

(1994). The role of the inner enemy in European self-definition: Identity, culture and international relations theory. History of European Ideas: Vol. 19, No. 1-3, pp. 53-61.

The duty to provide care is foundational to the nursing profession and the work of nurses. Unfortunately, violence against nurses at the hands of recipients of care is increasingly common. While employers, labor unions, and professional associations decry the phenomenon, the decision to withdraw care, even from someone who is violent or abusive, is never easy. The scant guidance that exists suggests that the duty to care continues until the risk of harm to the nurse is unreasonable, however, “reasonableness” remains (...) undefined in the literature. In this paper, I suggest that reasonable risk, and the resulting strength of the duty to provide care in situations where violence is present, hinge on the vulnerability of both nurse and recipient of care. For the recipient, vulnerability increases with the level of dependency and incapacity. For the nurse, vulnerability is related to the risk and implications of injury. The complex interplay of contextual vulnerabilities determines whether the risk a nurse faces at the hands of a violent patient is reasonable or unreasonable. This examination will enhance our understanding of professional responsibilities and can help to clarify the strengths and limitations of the nurse's duty to care. (shrink)

In spite of the fact that most university campuses are considered bastions of liberalism (in contrast to the conservative “mainstream”), it remains difficult for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered faculty members and students to come out, and instances of poor treatment still occur. In addition, curricular issues related to LGBT identities and concerns continue to be met with resistance or outright hostility. In this paper, I argue that all faculty—not just LGBT faculty—have an obligation to play a more active role (...) in creating an LGBT-friendly environment on their respective campuses. I end with suggestions for achieving this goal. (shrink)