This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty.

Engaging in environmental stewardship is critical for sustainability. Understanding individual differences and engagement is an important gap in present scholarship and addressing it is necessary to understand individual factors that relate to the types of activities engaged in, motivations and barriers to environmental stewardship. We surveyed 637 Canadian and American adults via Amazon Mechanical Turk, querying a range of demographic, psychological and environmental perceptions factors as well as motivations and barriers to stewardship activities. Respondents were ultimately grouped into Non-Stewards, Home-Oriented (...) Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards. Few differences were found among these groups. However, Home-Oriented Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards exhibited very different initial and ongoing motivations to engage in environmental stewardship. Accordingly, we identify stewardship motivations as a potential leverage point and as one of several promising avenues for future research related to enhancing engagement in environmental stewardship for the sustainability of the planet. (shrink)

In _Black Sun_, Julia Kristeva addresses the subject of melancholia, examining this phenomenon in the context of art, literature, philosophy, the history of religion and culture, as well as psychoanalysis. She describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a nearly unattainable goal and explains how the love of a lost identity of attachment lies at the very core of depression's dark heart. In her discussion she analyzes Holbein's controversial 1522 painting (...) "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb," and has revealing comments on the works of Marguerite Duras, Dostoyevsky and Nerval. _Black Sun_ takes the view that depression is a discourse with a language to be learned, rather than strictly a pathology to be treated. (shrink)

Bringing together ecology, evolutionary moral psychology, and environmental ethics, J. Baird Callicott counters the narrative of blame and despair that prevails in contemporary discussions of climate ethics and offers a fresh, more optimistic approach.

The environmental crisis is global in scope, yet contemporary environmental ethics is centered predominantly in Western philosophy and religion. _Earth's Insights_ widens the scope of environmental ethics to include the ecological teachings embedded in non-Western worldviews. J. Baird Callicott ranges broadly, exploring the sacred texts of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Zen Buddhism, as well as the oral traditions of Polynesia, North and South America, and Australia. He also documents the attempts of various peoples to put their environmental (...) ethics into practice. Finally, he wrestles with a question of vital importance to all people sharing the fate of this small planet: How can the world's many and diverse environmental philosophies be brought together in a complementary and consistent whole? (shrink)

Virtue ethics is sometimes taken to be incapable of providing guidance for an individual's actions, as some other ethical theories do. I show how virtue ethics does provide guidance for action, and also meet the objection that, while it may account for what we ought to do, it cannot account for the force of duty and obligation.

To the renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein (1882--1960) was the most original innovator, male or female, in the psychoanalytic arena. Klein pioneered psychoanalytic practice with children and made major contributions to our understanding of both psychosis and autism. Along the way, she successfully introduced a new approach to the theory of the unconscious without abandoning the principles set forth by Freud. In her first biography of a fellow psychoanalyst, the prolific Kristeva considers Klein's life and (...) intellectual development, weaving a narrative that covers the history of psychoanalysis and illuminates Kristeva's own life and work. Kristeva tells the remarkable story of Klein's life: an unhappy wife and mother who underwent analysis, and -- without a medical or other advanced degree -- became an analyst herself at the age of 40. In examining her work, Kristeva proposes that Klein's "break" with Freud was really an attempt to complete his theory of the unconscious. Kristeva addresses Klein's numerous critics, and, in doing so, bridges the wide gulf between the clinical and theoretical worlds of psychoanalysis. Klein is celebrated here as the first person to see the mother as the source of not only creativity, but of thought itself, and the first to consider the place of matricide in psychic development. As such, Klein is a seminal figure in the evolution of the provocative ideas about motherhood and the psyche for which Kristeva is most famous. Klein is thus, in a sense, a mother to Kristeva, making this book an account of the development of Kristeva's own thought as well as Klein's. (shrink)

There is a Turing computable embedding $\Phi $ of directed graphs $\mathcal {A}$ in undirected graphs. Moreover, there is a fixed tuple of formulas that give a uniform effective interpretation; i.e., for all directed graphs $\mathcal {A}$, these formulas interpret $\mathcal {A}$ in $\Phi $. It follows that $\mathcal {A}$ is Medvedev reducible to $\Phi $ uniformly; i.e., $\mathcal {A}\leq _s\Phi $ with a fixed Turing operator that serves for all $\mathcal {A}$. We observe that there is a graph G (...) that is not Medvedev reducible to any linear ordering. Hence, G is not effectively interpreted in any linear ordering. Similarly, there is a graph that is not interpreted in any linear ordering using computable $\Sigma _2$ formulas. Any graph can be interpreted in a linear ordering using computable $\Sigma _3$ formulas. Friedman and Stanley [4] gave a Turing computable embedding L of directed graphs in linear orderings. We show that there is no fixed tuple of $L_{\omega _1\omega }$ -formulas that, for all G, interpret the input graph G in the output linear ordering $L$. Harrison-Trainor and Montalbán [7] have also shown this, by a quite different proof. (shrink)

Is Aristotle right when he says that Plato believed in a class ofentities which are "intermediate" between physical objects and Forms? It may seem unrewarding to ask this question again. Scholars divide into two groups over the answer, and it may well seem impossible by now for either side to make any point that will convince the other. If the issues are well understood, and the lines of the controversy drawn already, can it be worthwhile to reconsider the problem? In (...) this paper I shall try to reconsider this issue from a somewhat different angle. It may be that, while the traditional question cannot be conclusively answered as so stated, the problem can nevertheless be fruitfully investigated by first considering a related question,the answer to which has implications for the way in which the traditional question should be answered. (shrink)

This paper examines the ancient appeal to nature in ethics to support the account of the final end in life offered by the various schools from aristotle onwards. various modern objections against the appeal to nature are examined and found not to hold. as a result certain features of the ancient position emerge: the appeal to human nature is not an attempt to end ethical argument by appeal to undisputed fact; nor does it depend on a metaphysics which we can (...) no longer accept; nor is it meant to map out a specific way of life or set of ethical rules. it amounts to something like an appeal to moral psychology to set guidelines for a realistic ethical theory. a proper understanding of the ancient appeal to nature reveals the limits to some modern metaethical assumptions, and also the extent to which there may be more continuity between ancient ethics and some modern ethical thinking than is often assumed. (shrink)

Recently, scholars have looked more closely at the philosophical importance of the imaginative and literary aspects of Plato's writing, and have begun to appreciate the methods of ancient philosophers and commentators who studied Plato. This study brings together leading philosophical and literary scholars to investigate these new-old approaches.

It is well-known that in recent years, alongside the familiar forms of modern ethical theory, such as consequentialism, deontology, and rights theory, there has been a resurgence of interest in what goes by the name of “virtue ethics” — forms of ethical theory which give a prominent status to the virtues, and to the idea that an agent has a “final end” which the virtues enable her to achieve. With this has come an increase of theoretical interest in ancient ethical (...) theories, particularly Aristotle's, an interest which has made a marked difference in the way ethics is pursued in the Anglo-Saxon and European intellectual worlds. In this essay, I shall not be discussing modern virtue ethics, which is notably protean in form and difficult to pin down. I shall be focusing on ancient eudaimonistic ethical theories, for in their case we can achieve a clearer discussion of the problem I wish to discuss. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle was one of the most important and controversial philosophers of the Twentieth century. Long unavailable, Critical Essays: Collected Papers Volume 1 includes many of Ryle’s most important and thought-provoking papers. This volume contains 20 critical essays on the history of philosophy, with writing on Plato, Locke and Hume as well as important chapters on Russell and Wittgenstein. It also includes three essays on phenomenology, including Ryle’s famous review of Martin.

This paper argues that there is something deeply wrong with the attempt to give rule-following explanations of broadly rational activities. It thus supports the view that rational norms are part of the ”bedrock’ and it challenges the widespread strategy of attempting to explain an individual’s rational or linguistic abilities by attributing to her knowledge of a theory of some kind. The theorist who would attempt to attribute knowledge of norms to an individual in order to explain her ability to act (...) rationally is presented with a dilemma: either she is committed to a explanatory regress or she destroys the normative nature of these rational practices or activities, thus making it pointless to attribute knowledge of the norms to an individual who participates in these practices. The appeal to tacit or implicit knowledge does not help in avoiding the basic dilemma. (shrink)

The fact that humans have a special relationship to each other insofar as they belong in the same species is often taken to be a morally relevant difference between humans and other animals, one which justifies a greater moral status for all humans, regardless of their individual capacities. I give some reasons why this kind of relationship is not an appropriate ground for differential treatment of humans and nonhumans. I then argue that even if relationships do matter morally species membership (...) cannot justify a difference in moral status. This has important implications because it removes one barrier to giving animals greater moral status. (shrink)

‘The matter will hinge on this point: what will be established is the ideal wise and virtuous person either of the Stoics or of the Old Academy [Platonists and Aristotelians]. You can’t have both; the dispute between them is not about boundaries but about complete ownership, since all rationale for living is involved in one’s definition of the final good, and dispute about that is dispute about all rationale for living. So it can’t be both, since they disagree so deeply; (...) it must be one or the other.…I am dragged in different directions—at one time one view seems more convincing to me, at other times the other. Still, unless one or other of them is the case, I firmly believe that virtue is defeated. But—just on this issue they disagree.’. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 61, Issue 1, pp 82 - 109 Galen talks about tension, _tonos_, in a physiological sense, which seems to be related to either the innate heat of the living being, the good mixture of its humors, or the body’s _pneuma_. This paper shows that Galen, with some important distinctions concerning the substance of the soul, derives this use of _tonos_ from the Stoics. But beyond that, it shows that Galen uses _tonos_ in a strict psychological sense derived (...) from Plato as well, and integrates it in his characterization of the operations of the spirited part of the soul. (shrink)

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, _The Severed Head_ unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work--_the power of horror_--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva (...) considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction. (shrink)

Physicians are trained to an expert degree in the scientific knowledge and skills of biomedicine. Despite this training, however, physicians’ professional lives are rife with instances in which they do not know. They must operate adeptly in the face of numerous uncertainties, as the extensiveness of the scientific literature, unknown mechanisms of pharmaceuticals or biological processes, and variations in patients’ etiologies and anatomies render it impossible to know everything. Similarly, physicians study vast swaths of scientific concepts and clinical skills throughout (...) their careers, yet individual physicians cannot commit all that biomedical knowledge to memory. Given the impossibility of absolute knowledge... (shrink)

How are we to account for the authority granted to first-person reports of mental states? What accounts for the immediacy of these self-ascriptions; the fact that they can be ascribed without appeal to evidence and without the need for justification? A traditional, Cartesian conception of the mind, which says that our thoughts are presented to us directly, completely, and without distortion upon mere internal inspection, would account for these facts, but there is good reason to doubt the cogency of the (...) Cartesian view. Wittgenstein, in his later writings, offered some of the most potent considerations against the traditional view, and contemporary philosophy of mind is practically unanimous in rejecting some of the metaphysical aspects of Cartesianism. But anyone who repudiates Cartesianism shoulders the burden of finding another way to accommodate its apparent epistemological strengths. (shrink)

Galen is criticized for combining Plato’s tripartition-cum-trilocation of the soul, in which each part constitutes its own source of motivation, with the demand that the faculty of voluntary motion is limited to the rational part, being the only one located in the brain and having access to the relevant nerves. While scholars have concentrated on small nerves as connective organs, this paper focuses on thepneuma, blood and innate heat. When the latter is increased, the irrational parts can affect the brain’s (...) function to such an extent that the rational part’s volitions are reduced to their own desires. (shrink)

Sextus’s arguments against ethical theories are shorter and more general than those he brings against the other two parts of ancient philosophy, logic and physics. Until recently this part of his work, in Outlines of Pyrrhonism III and Adversus Mathematicos XI has been comparatively neglected. Now, as well as the splendidly scholarly book by Emidio Spinelli, Sesto Empirico: Contro Gli Etici we have Richard Bett’s translation with commentary in the Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers series. Both books make Sextus’s sometimes elusive (...) work far more available and usable to the modern reader. (shrink)

O teórico Michael Löwy afirmou que o campo científico é social e politicamente condicionado, não sendo viável estabelecer um distanciamento entre ciência e ideologia. No atual momento, é possível visualizar a clareza dessa afirmação, na medida em que o campo científico se demonstra obstruído diante do cenário político vivenciado. O pensamento crítico e problematizador é tido como um perigo eminente perante a conjuntura conservadora e antidemocrática que se acentua. Com isso, a produção de pensamento crítico e o posicionamento de resistência, (...) diante da formação conservadora, assume a denominação de doutrinação, e o debate gerador de reflexão tende a ser calado, sobretudo se não confirmar a lógica dominante. Ao compreendermos a necessidade de reafirmar o teor questionador da produção de conhecimento, como elemento central na formação social, entende-se sua relevância na construção de um caminho democrático do pensamento social. Neste trabalho, buscamos levantar reflexões a partir de uma revisão bibliográfica, procurando entender produção de conhecimento em um período de anti-intelectualismo. Em contraposição ao conceito positivista de neutralidade do conhecimento, pretende-se investigar a relação dialética entre representação política e formação intelectual. Nossa concepção de pesquisa científica situa-se em um campo que não é neutro, mas permeado de diferentes concepções de mundo, de ser humano e de conhecimento, bem como engendrada por relações que ocorrem entre sujeitos, que propendem a produzir conhecimentos científicos a partir do seu lugar social, um lugar suficientemente privilegiado. Este trabalho se propõe examinar essas questões, ao referenciar a formação social como aspecto determinante na produção de conhecimento. Aponta-se à figura do intelectual orgânico como elemento essencial para pensar essa questão, ao salientar a contraposição ao retrocesso científico imposto no último período e a valorização do pensamento crítico, mais do que nunca como pensamento que resiste no campo da pesquisa e diante do sistema produtivista que o concebe. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind was published over 50 years ago to wide acclaim, but his legacy has been tempered because of important misconceptions, including a) that contemporary philosophy has sufficiently absorbed what is valuable about his contribution; b) that he is responsible for propounding a version of philosophical behaviourism; and c) that Ryle travels down a substantially different philosophical track from that of Wittgenstein. This critical introduction sets out to overturn these misconceptions. It is extremely rare for a (...) UK-based philosopher to be invited to produce a critical introduction for a book published (in French) in France. The French publication has led to a) an invitation to produce an entry for Ryle for Stanford’s (on-line) Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, b) an AHRC research leave award to turn the introduction into a (English) book; an invitation to give lectures on the book at the Université de Picardie. The English version of the critical has received warm praise from a number of philosophers, including Cora Diamond. (shrink)

© JNCCN-Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.Background: Next-generation tumor sequencing panels, which include multiple established and novel targets across cancers, are emerging in oncology practice, but lack formal positive coverage by US payers. Lack of coverage may impact access and adoption. This study identified challenges of NGTS coverage by private payers.Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 NGTS experts on potential NGTS benefits, and with 10 major payers, representing more than 125,000,000 enrollees, on NGTS coverage considerations. We used the (...) framework approach of qualitative research for study design and thematic analyses and simple frequencies to further describe findings.Results: All interviewed payers see potential NGTS benefits, but all noted challenges to formal coverage: 80% state that inherent features of NGTS do not fit the medical necessity definition required for coverage, 70% view NGTS as a bundle of targets versus comprehensive tumor characterization and may evaluate each target individually, and 70% express skepticism regarding new evidence methods proposed for NGTS. Fifty percent of payers expressed sufficient concerns about NGTS adoption and implementation that will preclude their ability to issue positive coverage policies.Conclusions: Payers perceive that NGTS holds significant promise but, in its current form, poses disruptive challenges to coverage policy frameworks. Proactive multidisciplinary efforts to define the direction for NGTS development, evidence generation, and incorporation into coverage policy are necessary to realize its promise and provide patient access. This study contributes to current literature, as possibly the first study to directly interview US payers on NGTS coverage and reimbursement. (shrink)