This is a volatile time for health insurance policy. Medicare and Medicaid are in turmoil, as is the private health insurance market. Public and private health insurance costs constitute eighty percent of healthcare spending in the United States. Public health professionals depend on the insurance system to behave in ways that are responsive to public health in prevention and crisis management.Seventy-five percent of the American population, excluding the elderly, has coverage through the private health insurance system. Ninety percent of this (...) group receives their insurance through employer-sponsored programs, and the remaining ten percent buy their own coverage. Approximately ten percent of the non-elderly population has insurance through a government program, and fifteen percent of the non-elderly population, almost forty-one million Americans, is uninsured. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titles: Introduction Response Functions Information and Singular Causation The Functions of Sensory Representations The Contents of Sensory Representations: The Problem of Error The Contents of Sensory Representation: The Distality Problem.

There is, to all appearances, a philosophic hostility to fashionable dress. Studying this contempt, this paper examines likely sources in philosophy's suspicion of change; anxiety about surfaces and the inessential; failures in the face of death; and the philosophic disdain for, denial of, the human body and human passivity. If there are feminist concerns about fashion, they should be radically different from those of traditional philosophy. Whatever our ineluctable worries about desire and death, whatever our appropriate anger and impatience with (...) the merely superficial, whatever our genuine need to mark off the serious from the trivial, feminism may be a corrective therapy for philosophy's bad humor and self-deception, as these manifest themselves when the subject turns to beautiful clothes. (shrink)

The human sensory system is continuously engaged in experiencing and interpreting every interaction with other living beings, objects, and the environment. The purpose of this article is to describe the impact limited opportunities for rich sensory experiences have on students with severe disabilities in two middle school classrooms situated in a public separate school in the southeastern USA. The study employed a postcritical ethnographic approach and grounded theory thematic analysis of fieldnotes gathered over a two-year period. Three major themes supported (...) by the data are presented and discussed in depth. They are: students are afforded limited sensory rich experiences, everyday routines make students passive recipients to school, and instructional approaches result in little interaction with extended periods of waiting. The implications of the findings for improved sensory experiences and possible future directions are described. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared that philosophy “ought really to be written only as a form of poetry,” and he even described the Tractatus as “philosophical and, at the same time, literary.” But few books have really followed up on these claims, and fewer still have focused on their relation to the special literary and artistic period in which Wittgenstein worked. This book offers the first collection to address the rich, vexed, and often contradictory relationship between modernism—the twentieth century’s predominant cultural (...) and artistic movement—and Wittgenstein, one of its preeminent and most enduring philosophers. In doing so it offers rich new understandings of both. Michael LeMahieu Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé bring together scholars in both twentieth-century philosophy and modern literary studies to put Wittgenstein into dialogue with some of modernism’s most iconic figures, including Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Walter Benjamin, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Adolf Loos, Robert Musil, Wallace Stevens, and Virginia Woolf. The contributors touch on two important aspects of Wittgenstein’s work and modernism itself: form and medium. They discuss issues ranging from Wittgenstein and poetics to his use of numbered propositions in the Tractatus as a virtuoso performance of modernist form; from Wittgenstein’s persistence metaphoric use of religion, music, and photography to an exploration of how he and Henry James both negotiated the relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical. Covering many other fascinating intersections of the philosopher and the arts, this book offers an important bridge across the disciplinary divides that have kept us from a fuller picture of both Wittgenstein and the larger intellectual and cultural movement of which he was a part. (shrink)

As an effect of the recent economic and financial crisis in the USA, a vast number of people have suddenly lost their jobs and income and often also their home. Many of them still live in their cars or even just in the streets. In spring 2007, the young.

The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises have become increasingly relevant in the debate on the role of business in society. This instrument for responsible business conduct (RBC) is considered to be unique due to its implementation mechanism, the National Contact Point (NCP) procedure. The NCP procedure applies a pragmatic stakeholder engagement approach to contribute to the effectiveness of the OECD Guidelines. However, little is known about the effects of the NCP procedure. To fill this gap, this study provides insights into (...) the ex‐post effects of the Dutch NCP procedure on solving non‐compliance issues, the RBC performance of MNEs, and societal impact. This study developed a framework of different layers of effects. It used this framework to gather and analyze empirical data through interviews with parties that have participated in non‐compliance procedures. The effects found are mainly related to solving issues, while the effects on RBC within MNEs and their societal impact seem limited. Based on the findings, this study concludes that the full potential of the OECD Guidelines remains unrealized in most of the investigated cases. (shrink)

Newton (1643-1727) es considerado una de las más importantes figuras de la historia de la ciencia moderna. Así como Descartes es considerado el fundador de la moderna filosofía de la subjetividad, Newton es visto como el fundador de la moderna ciencia matemática de la naturaleza, en particular de la mecánica, que ha operado alrededor de dos siglos de manera paradigmática y a la que solemos caracterizar como "física clásica". Aunque Newton no es en modo alguno el único innovador de la (...) ciencia moderna -al lado de él participaron también otros como Copémico, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes-, logró, empero, merced a la introducción de la fuerza de la gravitación, unificar diferentes formas de movimiento, como los terrestres -la caída libre, el movimiento del péndulo, el lanzamiento- y los celestes, -los movimientos de los planetas los cuales con Galileo aún permanecían desconectados unos al lado de otros y demostrarlos como una modificación de la misma fuerza fundamental y dar, gracias a ello, una estructura unitaria, sistemática a la teoría del movimiento. Ningún otro sistema representa de una forma tan fiel el concepto de paradigma de Kuhn, como la mecánica newtoniana. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.1 (2001) 21-37 [Access article in PDF] Conscience and the Concealments of Metaphor in Hobbes's Leviathan Karen S. Feldman Introduction Conscience is not a topic of terribly heated debate in Hobbes research. 1 Nevertheless, my claim in this article is that conscience in the Leviathan, which Hobbes poses as an example of the dangers of metaphor, is not merely an example of the dangers of (...) metaphor, but rather is the most dangerous metaphor, the metaphor that corrupts knowledge and thereby makes error and deception possible. Hobbes's brief account of conscience, which appears in the chapter of Leviathan on the ends of discourse, tells the story of the insinuation of metaphor into proper nomenclature; however, his example of the metaphorical use of the word conscience turns the story into one in which public knowledge itself is made private and thereby corrupted. Moreover, according to the story, private conscience is itself invented by means of a metaphor; it is in effect metaphorized into being. 2 With the emergence of private conscience, the potential of privatization expands from the privatization of the meaning of words to an entire private sphere of opinion. The metaphorical corruption of conscience invents a new understanding of knowledge as isolated from other witnesses, and the resultant privatization of truth lends itself to the corruption of that truth. Thus, whereas Hobbes characterizes the wrong use of names (of which metaphor is an instance) as a threat to accurate judgment and reason (L 22-23, 34, 161-62), as I will argue in the sections following, Hobbes's demand for the preservation of proper meaning in Leviathan corresponds to an anxiety regarding privacy and its peculiar potential for corrupting truth and knowledge. Hobbes's worries as to the dangers that metaphor poses to the stability of the commonwealth thereby converge with his worries about the dangers of conscience to the principle of public authority (cf. Strong 1993). [End Page 21] Hobbes's condemnations of conscience In Leviathan, conscience is condemned as a source of principles of human decision and action in a commonwealth. The problem with conscience as a principle of action is that it renders each individual inventor of his own rules and judge of his own actions. In brief, individual conscience is incommensurable with the public authority that defines a commonwealth: Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is, that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience, and his judgment is the same thing, and as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous. Therefore, though he that is subject to no civil law, sinneth in all he does against his conscience, because he has no other rule to follow but his own reason; yet it is not so with him that lives in a commonwealth; because the law is the public conscience, by which he hath already undertaken to be guided. Otherwise in such diversity, as there is of private consciences, which are but private opinions, the commonwealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the sovereign power, further than it shall seem good in his own eyes. (L 311) In this account, conscience is not just inferior to civil law as a principle guiding action, but at odds with civil society and the good of the commonwealth. The fact that conscience is private renders it problematic for the commonwealth for several reasons: First, as privately invented, it may be erroneous. Likewise, because it is private, conscience does not possess any binding power outside the individual, private sphere. Each person may be bound by his own conscience, but insofar as consciences differ, standards of action differ, and this leads to the undermining and distraction of the commonwealth. Likewise, private consciences may be divergent from one another, and the conflicts in private judgment produce conflicting actions that disturb the peace of the commonwealth. This rule of privacy is, moreover, associated with primitive life and with the state of nature... (shrink)

Portrayals of humanoid robots in television series draw heavily from the historical and cultural mythology of robots. This mythology is expressed in two contemporary television series, Almost Human and Humans, in which robots are depicted as closely resembling humans in physical appearance and behavior and as fulfilling social roles usually occupied by humans. The robots are imagined with characteristics associated with human consciousness, such as emotions, individuality, and free will. An analysis of the robots in these series, using Jean Paul (...) Sartre’s theories of consciousness and the Other, demonstrates that when the robots are depicted as conscious, the relationship between a human and robot is portrayed as one of human-to-human (or human-to-Other), not human-to-technology. Sartre’s philosophy helps describe the human characters’ fascination and fear of the robots as resulting from their perceptions of the Other’s shifting status of object and subject and the unpredictability associated with the Other’s freedom. Thus, it is not the machine aspects of the robot that are desired and feared, but the humanness within the machine. Viewed in this way, the humanoid robot as depicted these television series represents a continuing effort to define and describe the essence of humanity in a society where the boundaries between machines and humans are becomingly increasingly blurred. (shrink)

The practice of sending and receiving sexually explicit images via mobile phones has grown exponentially in recent years with the accessibility of cellular technology. This essay examines this practice, when conducted by teenagers, in light of a Christian feminist approach to justice. Without harmfully exhorting girls' sexual "purity", we must nevertheless develop a moral framework that challenges the practice of sexting while simultaneously empowering young women to claim primary control over their own sexual experience. For Christians, justice, addressed to sexting, (...) must attend to sexual injustice even as it promotes genuine freedom, embodiment, mutuality and relational intimacy, and equality. (shrink)

Fear appeals are used in many domains. Cybersecurity researchers are also starting to experiment with fear appeals, many reporting positive outcomes. Yet there are ethical concerns related to the use of fear to motivate action. In this paper, we explore this aspect from the perspectives of cybersecurity fear appealdeployersandrecipients. We commenced our investigation by considering fear appeals from three foundational ethical perspectives. We then consulted the two stakeholder groups to gain insights into the ethical concerns they consider to be pertinent. (...) We first consulteddeployers: (a) fear appeal researchers and (b) Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), and then potential cybersecurity fear appealrecipients:members of a crowdsourcing platform. We used their responses to develop aneffects-reasoning matrix, identifying the potential benefits and detriments of cybersecurity fear appeals for all stakeholders. Using these insights, we derived six ethical principles to guide cybersecurity fear appeal deployment. We then evaluated a snapshot of cybersecurity studies using the ethical principle lens. Our contribution is,first, a list of potential detriments that could result from the deployment of cybersecurity fear appeals andsecond, the set of six ethical principles to inform the deployment of such appeals. Both of these are intended to inform cybersecurity fear appeal design and deployment. (shrink)

Resumen: Este trabajo tiene como fin analizar el teatro como una representación de los conflictos del ser y su relación con el mundo. Se centra en el teatro de Gustavo Ott, para quien el Espectáculo es la Alteridad de la sociedad contemporánea, sus obras dramáticas plantean en el tema y la puesta en escena conflictos existenciales del hombre, así como la violencia, la muerte, lo absurdo, lo oscuro, la crueldad y el humor. Por ello, la investigación pretende describir cómo el (...) autor estetiza la violencia y experimenta puestas en escenas teatrales con la literatura y el cine, utilizando teorías y de La Alteridad de M. Bajtín; La Sociedad del Espectáculo, M. Vargas Llosa y El Cine de Q. Tarantino, por medio de una investigación cualitativa, con lectura analítica y amplios registros documentales.: This article is intended to analyse the Teatro, As A Representation of the conflicts of the self and its relationship with the world. Search the Through the actors--the characters, the Other being no more than the Self, evidencer A Concienc Cultural heritage in a Show society. The Research focuses on the theatre of Gustavo Ott, for whom The Show is la Alteridad of contemporary SocietyTheir Dramatic works Pose in the subject and staging existential conflicts of man, as well as Violence, death, the Absurd, the dark, the cruelty And The humour. Therefore, the article intends to describe as the author merely aestheticised the violence and experiments in theatrical scenes with literature and cinema, using Theories and methods of La Alteridad of M. Bakhtin; La Sociedad of the Show, M. Vargas Llosa, The Cinema of Q. Tarantino, Through qualitative research, with analytical reading and extensive documentary records. (shrink)

The French studies scholar Patrick Coleman made the important observation that over the course of the eighteenth century, the social meanings of anger became increasingly democratized. The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an outstanding example of this change. In Man or Citizen, Karen Pagani expands, in original and fascinating ways, the study of anger in Rousseau’s autobiographical, literary, and philosophical works. Pagani is especially interested in how and to what degree anger—and various reconciliatory responses to anger, such as forgiveness—functions (...) as a defining aspect of one’s identity, both as a private individual and as a public citizen. Rousseau himself was, as Pagani puts it, “unabashed” in his own anger and indignation—toward society on one hand (corrupter of our naturally good and authentic selves) and, on the other, toward certain individuals who had somehow wronged him (his famous philosophical disputes with Voltaire and Diderot, for example). In Rousseau’s work, Pagani finds that the extent to which an individual processes, expresses, and eventually resolves or satisfies anger is very much of moral and political concern. She argues that for Rousseau, anger is not only inevitable but also indispensable, and that the incapacity to experience it renders one amoral, while the ability to experience it is a key element of good citizenship. (shrink)

The authors in this edited volume reflect on their experiences with culturally relevant pedagogy-as students, as teachers, as researchers-and how these experiences were often at odds with their backgrounds and/or expectations.

El presente artículo tiene por objeto precisar la naturaleza del antagonismo que Mill reivindica a lo largo de su obra como uno de los remedios más eficaces a la hora de combatir el estancamiento político, intelectual y moral que amenaza a las sociedades modernas. El análisis se concentra principalmente en las notas de perpetuidad y sistematicidad que Mill le asigna y presenta al antagonismo como uno de los componentes del "liberalismo avanzado" al que él mismo decía suscribir.

El objetivo de este artículo es reconstruir la recepción de Mill en las costas rioplatenses, señalar en qué momentos y desde qué espacios su nombre y sus ideas fueron invocados y qué obras suyas circularon por estas latitudes en las últimas décadas del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX. Se detiene particularmente en la lectura que, sobre sus contribuciones políticas, ofreció Florentino González (jurista colombiano a quien se encomendó la inauguración de la cátedra de derecho constitucional en la Facultad de (...) Derecho de la Universidad de Buenos Aires) por cuánto ella inaugura la senda y los límites dentro de los cuales habrán de recogerse la mayoría de las referencias locales que aparecen en las siguientes décadas. (shrink)

Drawing on insights from causal theories of reference, teleosemantics, and state space semantics, a theory of naturalized mental representation. In A Mark of the Mental, Karen Neander considers the representational power of mental states—described by the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn as the “second hardest puzzle” of philosophy of mind. The puzzle at the heart of the book is sometimes called “the problem of mental content,” “Brentano's problem,” or “the problem of intentionality.” Its motivating mystery is how neurobiological states can (...) have semantic properties such as meaning or reference. Neander proposes a naturalistic account for sensory-perceptual representations. Neander draws on insights from state-space semantics, causal theories of reference, and teleosemantic theories. She proposes and defends an intuitive, theoretically well-motivated but highly controversial thesis: sensory-perceptual systems have the function to produce inner state changes that are the analogs of as well as caused by their referents. Neander shows that the three main elements—functions, causal-information relations, and relations of second-order similarity—complement rather than conflict with each other. After developing an argument for teleosemantics by examining the nature of explanation in the mind and brain sciences, she develops a theory of mental content and defends it against six main content-determinacy challenges to a naturalized semantics. (shrink)

An exploration of everything Kant's philosophy can teach us about being the best people we can be, from using our human reasoning to its fullest potential to being affably drunk at dinner parties. Immanuel Kant is well known as one of the towering figures of Western philosophical history, but he is less well known for his savvy advice about hosting dinner parties. This philosophical genius was a man of many interests and talents: his famously formal and abstract ethical system is (...) only part of his story. But Kant not only made a profound impact on how people think about big questions like how to treat one another -- he also offered wise insights on things people confront in everyday life: things like gossip, friendship, manners, self-respect, cheerfulness, gratitude, mockery, contempt, and yes, dinner parties. In this book, philosopher Karen Stohr shows how Kant's whole ethical picture fits together. It's a picture that is as relevant and useful now as it was in the 18th century--and maybe even more so. A Kantian way of living means using reason to guide your choices so that your life reflects your true nature as a free, rational being. This nature is one we share with others; Kantianism emphasizes the fundamental dignity and equality of each person. It presents an ideal for how we should live together without downplaying the challenges we face in the actual world. Though realistic about human weaknesses, Kant remained optimistic about our capacities and possibilities. He had great faith in the ability of human reason to point us in the direction of moral progress and to get us there. Each of us has the power within us to know and choose the right path--we just have to be willing to make that choice, and to discover how worthwhile life can be in the process. (shrink)