Chia, Edmund Kee-Fook Review of: Lay people in the church: A critical study of the theology of the laity in the documents of the federation of Asian bishops' conferences with special reference to John Paul's apostolic exhortation, by Peter Nguyen Van Hai, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015, pp. 290, US$76.95.

McInerney, Patrick Review of: World Christianity encounters world religions: A summa of interfaith dialogue, by Edmund Kee-Fook Chia, pp. 272, US$29.95.

This book is born out of two contradictions: first, it explores the making of meaning in a musical form that was made to lose its meaning at the turn of the nineteenth century; secondly, it is a history of a music that claims to have no history - absolute music. The book therefore writes against that notion of absolute music which tends to be the paradigm for most musicological and analytical studies. It is concerned not so much with what music (...) is, but with why and how meaning is constructed in instrumental music and what structures of knowledge need to be in place for such meaning to exist. From the thought of Vincenzo Galilei to that of Theodore Adorno, Daniel Chua suggests that instrumental music has always been a critical and negative force in modernity, even with its nineteenth-century apotheosis as 'absolute music'. (shrink)

Background:Moral distress, moral sensitivity, and moral courage among healthcare professionals have been explored considerably in recent years. However, there is a paucity of studies exploring these topics among baccalaureate nursing students.Aim/objective:The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between and among moral distress, moral sensitivity, and moral courage of undergraduate baccalaureate nursing students.Research design:The research employed a descriptive-correlational design to explore the relationships between and among moral distress, moral sensitivity, and moral courage of undergraduate nursing students.Participants and research (...) context:A total of 293 baccalaureate Filipino nursing students who have been exposed to various clinical areas participated in the study.Ethical considerations:Institutional review board approval was sought prior to the conduct of the study. Self-determination was assured and anonymity and confidentiality were guaranteed to all participants.Findings:Results indicate that a majority of the nursing students in the clinical areas encounter morally distressing situations that compromise quality patient care. However, despite the fact that they want to do what is in the best interest of their patients, their perception of being the inexperienced among the healthcare team drives the majority of them to ignore morally distressing situations to avoid conflict and confrontation. Another interesting finding is that 79.20% of the respondents hardly consider quitting the nursing profession even if they frequently encounter morally distressing situations. Analysis also shows associations between moral distress intensity and frequency ( r = 0.13, p < 0.05) and moral distress intensity and moral sensitivity ( r = 0.25, p < 0.05). The dimensions of moral courage are also related to both moral distress and moral sensitivity.Conclusion:Results of the study imply that moral distress is a reality among all healthcare professionals including nursing students and requires more consideration by nurse educators. (shrink)

The law applicable to genomics in the United States is currently in transition and under debate. The rapid evolution of the science, burgeoning clinical research, and growing clinical application pose serious challenges for federal and state law. Although there has been some empirical work in this area, this is the first paper to survey and interview key scientific and legal stakeholders in the field of genomics to help ground identification of the most important legal problems that must be solved to (...) successfully integrate genomics into clinical care. The respondents in this study identified a wide range of interconnected issues, focusing specifically on the need for clear guidelines about how to use these data, fear of liability for those who use these data, and the need to protect patients from use of this information particularly by insurers, while endorsing data sharing. Developing legal strategies to support appropriate use of genomics now and in the future clearly will require making trade-offs, taking into account the full complexity of this legal ecosystem. (shrink)

A formula ϕ in the one non-logical symbol ϵ with one free variable x is Russell if the sentence Vχ) is logically valid. This note describes a pattern common to the classical examples of Russell formulas, adds a couple of new ones, and constructs many formulas that are near-Russell.

Some accounts of human distinctiveness focus on anatomical features, such as bipedalism and brain size. Others focus on cognitive abilities, such as tool use and manufacture, language, and social cognition. Embodied approaches to cognition highlight the internal relations between these two groups of characteristics, arguing that cognition is rooted in and shaped by embodiment. This paper complements existing embodied approaches by focusing on an underappreciated aspect of embodiment: the appearance of the human body as condition of human sociality and cognition. (...) I approach this issue through Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the animate body as an intertwining of perceiving and perceivable aspects. The eye is both an animal’s embodied, perceptual openness onto the world, and the means by which that experiential openness can be perceived by others. The morphology and appearance of its embodiment condition how an animal comes to understand others and itself as animate subjects. I interpret the perceivable appearance of the human eye and skin in comparison with those of other animals. An underappreciated dimension of human distinctiveness, I argue, is the way the human sense organs render human perceiving comparatively more perceivable to conspecifics. (shrink)

In this ground-breaking work, Deborah Cowen makes the first book-length critical intervention into the field of business logistics. Tracing the social, spatial and political transformations wrought by the ‘logistics revolution’, Cowen argues that logistical systems have blurred the boundaries between production and circulation, civilian and military life, and geopolitics and geo-economics, constructing an architecture of the supply chain animated by both the art of war and the science of business. This review considers the political stakes of Cowen’s argument that logistics (...) has reconfigured capitalist social relations of production, especially in relation to the securitisation of spatial mobility and the restructuring of the labour process. In particular, Cowen’s wager that logistical supply-chains are characterised by their vulnerability – and that attendant possibilities for building solidarity emerge out of movements that disrupt such flows – is interrogated in order to question whether such interruptions effectively produce challenges to value-in-motion, or actually become integral to processes of value production. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a novel account of the phenomenality of language by focusing on characteristics of perceived speech. I explore the extent to which the spoken word can be said to have a horizonal structure similar to that of spatiotemporal objects: our perception of each is informed by habitual associations and expectations formed through past experiences of the object or word and other associated objects and experiences. Specifically, the horizonal structure of speech in use can fruitfully be compared (...) to that of a tool in use. The comparison suggests an account of our linguistic faculty as continuous with more foundational faculties of perception and action. I provide empirical corroboration of this account by drawing on recent neuroimaging studies of the multimodal, sensorimotor bases of speech comprehension. I then discuss how such an understanding of our linguistic ability helps advocates of embodied, non-representationalist accounts of cognition respond to a common objection. Critics grant that embodied approaches may be adequate to account for lower-level, online modes of cognition, such as perception and action, which directly engage their object. But they question whether such approaches can “scale up” to higher modes of cognition, such as imagination, memory, thought, and language, which can entertain absent, non-existent, or abstract objects. By providing a plausible account of the continuity of lower cognition and language-involving cognition, my approach responds to this objection, at least where language is concerned. (shrink)

Since scholarly interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has primarily focused on the synergies between social and economic performance, our understanding of how (and the conditions under which) companies use CSR to produce policy outcomes that work against public welfare has remained comparatively underdeveloped. In particular, little is known about how corporate decision-makers privately reconcile the conflicts between public and private interests, even though this is likely to be relevant to understanding the limitations of CSR as a means of aligning (...) business activity with the broader public interest . This study addresses this issue using internal tobacco industry documents to explore British-American Tobacco’s (BAT) thinking on CSR and its effects on the company’s CSR Programme. The article presents a three-stage model of CSR development, based on Sykes and Matza’s theory of techniques of neutralization, which links together: how BAT managers made sense of the company’s declining political authority in the mid-1990s; how they subsequently justified the use of CSR as a tool of stakeholder management aimed at diffusing the political impact of public health advocates by breaking up political constituencies working towards evidence-based tobacco regulation; and how CSR works ideologically to shape stakeholders’ perceptions of the relative merits of competing approaches to tobacco control. Our analysis has three implications for research and practice. First, it underlines the importance of approaching corporate managers’ public comments on CSR critically and situating them in their economic, political and historical contexts. Second, it illustrates the importance of focusing on the political aims and effects of CSR. Third, by showing how CSR practices are used to stymie evidence-based government regulation, the article underlines the importance of highlighting and developing matrices to assess the negative social impacts of CSR. (shrink)

I discuss Eckhart’s and Aquinas’ conception of human-divine union with reference to what I call the problem of intrinsic goods, a problem concerning how to reconcile the pursuit of actions which are prima facie sought for their own sake (e.g. pursuing justice for the marginalized, listening to a work of music) with the pursuit of God as the ultimate end of every action. I introduce the problem with the help of Germain Grisez’s critique of Aquinas’ account of union with God, (...) and I suggest that Eckhart’s alternative conception of union may be understood as an attempt to resolve (or dissolve) the problem. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 209 Seiten: 249-275.

Critical reflection helps professionals to learn directly from their practice experience, so that they can improve their own work in an ongoing and flexible way - something essential in today's complex and changing organisations. It allows change to be managed in a way which enables individuals to preserve a sense of what is fundamentally important to them as professionals. It is particularly important as it can also help make sense of some fundamental issues, and so also has implications for how (...) we live our lives. However, more systematic research on critical reflection is needed to help us understand what works best for professionals in different settings. This timely work explores how critical reflection is researched, evaluated and used as a research method itself, with the aim of improving how it is taught and practised in a rigorous and transferable way. Developing a more comprehensive and multi-disciplinary view of the current state of critical reflection and the research directions which need to be taken, the book is divided into four parts. It: - Provides an overview of different perspectives on critical reflection and stimulates dialogue between them - Establishes some common platforms from which to develop further research directions - Identifies the major issues in evaluating critical reflection teaching, and main methods for doing so - Contributes to social science methodological innovations by exploring how methods based on critical reflection can be used for researching professional practice - Contains contributions from academics who are internationally known and highly experienced in different aspects of critical reflection. Researching Critical Reflectionis an important reference for all students, practitioners, and researchers - including in the areas of education, management, health and social work - who engage with critical reflection to develop their practice. (shrink)

Prior studies have provided explanations for the presence, use and dissemination of codes of corporate ethics or codes of corporate conduct of business corporations. Most such explanations are functional in nature, and are descriptive as they are derived from the codes and their associated documents. We search for more underlying explanations using two complementary theories: first, social contract theories explaining the exogenous and endogenous reasons of organizational behavior, and then institutional theory explaining why organizations take similar measures in response to (...) institutional pressures. Based on our explanations, we contend that the codes and their use and dissemination are arising from underlying social and institutional pressures for firms to continuously validate their existence in the face of increasing changes and recurrent uncertainties. (shrink)

This paper asks why information should ever be expressed vaguely, re-assessing some previously proposed answers to this question and suggesting some new ones. Particular attention is paid to the benefits that vague expressions can have in situations where agreement over the meaning of an expression cannot be taken for granted. A distinction between two different versions of the above-mentioned question is advocated. The first asks why human languages contain vague expressions, the second question asks when and why a speaker should (...) choose a vague expression when communicating with a hearer. While the former question is purely theoretical, the latter has practical implications for the computational generation of utterances in Natural Language Generation (NLG). (shrink)

Internet is often said to open up new avenues for a more direct and deliberative democracy. In this article, the notion of ‘deliberation’ will be problematized and a typology of political web sites will be developed. Next, three case studies of Dutch discussion sites are used to test the claim that the organizational structure, aim, control of content and kind of interactivity of political web sites can explain the level and quality of participation. Except for its mostly extreme elitist participation, (...) the research presented here gives a rather ambiguous picture of e-democracy at work. Not only are we confronted with more paradoxes than clear-cut answers, the question is raised whether notions such as the ‘public sphere’ are not more of a hindrance than a help in making sense of politics on the Internet. (shrink)

Visual feedback regulation during movement is not fully captured in Plamondon's kinematic theory. However, numerous studies indicate that visual response-produced feedback is a powerful determinant of performance and kinematic characteristics of target-directed movement.

Dans cet article, composé en hommage aux travaux de Peter Sharratt, l’auteur examine l’attitude de Pierre de La Ramée (Ramus) et d’Omer Talon à l’égard de l’Éthique à Nicomaque. En tant qu’humanistes, ces derniers s’occupent intensément des arts du discours. Tout en reconnaissant la nécessité d’un fondement éthique dans tout discours, ils se montrent violemment hostiles au traité aristotélicien. Le traité posthume de théologie composé par Ramus propose le Décalogue comme source exclusive de la morale chrétienne. Ramus et Talon refusent (...) de la sorte de s’engager dans la voie ouverte quelques décennies plus tôt par Ph. Melanchthon, qui avait intégré de manière originale la morale antique, notamment celle d’Aristote, dans la théologie protestante. Toutefois, vers la fin du xvie siècle, le philosophe hollandais Rodolphe Snellius, père adoptif du théologien Arminius, composera un traité de morale dans lequel il tente de concilier la morale aristotélicienne avec la méthode développée par Ramus et son équipe. (shrink)

This interview with Jeremy Waldron covers three topics. Firstly, we dealt with the methodology debate, that is, the discussion about how to proceed in analyzing the nature of law. Does the question ‘What is law?’ require a descriptive analysis of the concept of law or, rather, a normative exercise in political philosophy? Secondly, we spoke about the role of law in response to historic injustice, especially in relation to the restitution of property rights. On this topic Waldron vindicates the ‘supersession-thesis’, (...) the idea that, due to changed circumstances and the passage of time, historic injustices become superseded. The third section of the interview is devoted to Waldron’s perspective on the citation of foreign law by national judges. (shrink)

In Everettian quantum mechanics, justifications for the Born rule appeal to self-locating uncertainty or decision theory. Such justifications have focused exclusively on a pure-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a wave function. Recent works in quantum foundations suggest that it is viable to consider a mixed-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a (mixed-state) density matrix. Here, we develop the conceptual foundations for decoherence and branching in a mixed-state multiverse, and extend arguments for the Born rule to this setting. This extended framework provides (...) a unification of 'classical' and 'quantum' probabilities, and additional theoretical benefits, for the Everettian picture. (shrink)

In recent years, social cognition approaches to human evolution and Material Engagement Theory have offered new theoretical resources to advance our understanding of the prehistoric hominin mind. To date, however, these two approaches have developed largely in isolation from one another. I argue that there is a gap between social- and material-centred approaches, and that this is precisely the sociomateriality of the appearance of ancestral hominin bodies, which evolved under selective pressure to develop increasingly complex, cooperative sociality. To get this (...) sociomaterial body in focus, I develop an esthesiological framework, appropriated from Merleau-Ponty (2003), for interpreting the expressive body in an evolutionary and comparative context. The guiding hypothesis of esthesiology is that before being rationality (social or material), “humanity is another corporeity” (Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p. 208). Esthesiology studies the appearance of the body and its sense organs as an intertwining locus of a sensing power (the ability to see, to touch, etc.) and a sensible character (the visible, touchable body). It is this dual-aspect character of the body that facilitates the most basic affective and sensorimotor modes of sociality. Examining these features from a comparative perspective, we find that the human body is distinctively suited to prosocial communication and cooperation: a more cooperative eye, an exposed and communicative skin. I thus propose a cooperative body hypothesis, by analogy with the cooperative eye hypothesis (Tomasello et al., 2007). Esthesiology provides a framework for integrating and interpreting a wide range of otherwise disconnected facts concerning human and nonhuman animal bodies, forms of life, cognition, and evolution, thereby bridging the gap between social cognition and material engagement perspectives. In doing so, however, it not only solves problems and proposes new directions of investigation, but also demands theoretical revisions from each. (shrink)

Background: Nurses exposed to community health nursing commonly encounter situations that can be morally distressing. However, most research on moral distress has focused on acute care settings and very little research has explored moral distress in a community health nursing setting especially among nursing students. Aim: To explore the moral distress experiences encountered by undergraduate baccalaureate nursing students in community health nursing. Research design: A descriptive qualitative design was employed to explore the community health nursing experiences of the nursing students (...) that led them to have moral distress. Participants and research context: The study included 14 senior nursing students who had their course in Community Health Nursing in their sophomore year and stayed in the partner communities in their junior year for 6 and 3 weeks during their senior year. Ethical considerations: Institutional review board approval was sought prior to the conduct of the study. Self-determination was assured and anonymity and confidentiality were guaranteed to all participants. Findings: Nursing students are vulnerable and likely to experience moral distress when faced with ethical dilemmas. They encounter numerous situations which make them question their own values and ideals and those of that around them. Findings of the study surfaced three central themes which included moral distress emanating from the unprofessional behavior of some healthcare workers, the resulting sense of powerlessness, and the differing values and mindsets of the people they serve in the community. Conclusion: This study provides educators a glimpse of the morally distressing situations that often occurs in the community setting. It suggests the importance of raising awareness and understanding of these situations to assist nursing students to prepare themselves to the “real world,” where the ideals they have will be constantly challenged and tested. (shrink)

Xunzi's philosophy provides a rich resource for understanding how ethical relationships between humans and nature can be articulated in terms of harmony. In this paper, I build on his ideas to develop the concept of reciprocal harmony, which requires us to reciprocate those who make our lives liveable. In the context of the environment, I argue that reciprocal harmony generates moral obligations towards nature, in return for the existential debt that humanity owes towards heaven and earth. This can be used (...) as a normative basis for an environmental ethic that enables humanity and nature to flourish together. (shrink)

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

Taking the formal analogies between black holes and classical thermodynamics seriously seems to first require that classical thermodynamics applies in relativistic regimes. Yet, by scrutinizing how classical temperature is extended into special relativity, I argue that the concept falls apart. I examine four consilient procedures for establishing the classical temperature: the Carnot process, the thermometer, kinetic theory, and black-body radiation. I argue that their relativistic counterparts demonstrate no such consilience in defining the relativistic temperature. As such, classical temperature doesn’t appear (...) to survive a relativistic extension. I suggest two interpretations for this situation: eliminativism akin to simultaneity, or pluralism akin to rotation. (shrink)

In his late lecture course titled “Nature and Logos: The Human Body” (1959-1960), Merleau-Ponty proposed that we understand human symbolism, language, and reason by viewing the human being initially as a variant on animal embodiment and perception prior to being a rational animal. To elaborate this project, he outlined an “esthesiology” informed by the study of evolution. However, in the sketches that survive of “Nature and Logos,” we find neither a detailed explanation of how Merleau-Ponty understood this approach nor its (...) concrete execution with respect to the human body. In this paper I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s esthesiology. An animate body possesses two “sides”: it is a sensing organism open onto the world and a sensible part of the natural world. Visual animals such as humans can see, see themselves, and be seen by others. To understand their way of life, we must study not only the body’s capacities for perception and action, but also how those capacities are seen by other organisms, especially conspecifics. The body’s visibility shapes the social prospects of a species and its potential for developing complex sociality, language, and cognition. I apply this basic esthesiological principle to study the human eye. Both in its vision and its visibility, the human eye is a distinctive variation of animality and one that conditions and shapes human sociality and cognition. I develop this insight with respect to a central philosophical theme of Merleau-Ponty’s late work, the relation of the visible and the invisible. I conclude by discussing the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s esthesiology for his late thought and current discussions of the naturalization of phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)