This volume aims to contextualize the development and reception of Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological idealism by placing him in dialogue with his most important interlocutors – his mentors, peers, and students. Husserl’s “turn” to idealism and the ensuing reaction to Ideas I resulted in a schism between the early members of the phenomenological movement. The division between the realist and the transcendental phenomenologists is often portrayed as a sharp one, with the realists naively and dogmatically rejecting all of Husserl’s written work after (...) the Logical Investigations. However, this understanding of the trajectory of the phenomenological movement ignores the extensive and intricate contours of the idealism-realism debate. In addition to helping us better interpret Husserl’s attempts to defend his idealism, reconsidering the idealism-realism debate elucidates the relationship and differences between Husserl's phenomenology and the broader landscape of early 20th century German philosophy, particularly the Munich phenomenologists and the Neo-Kantians. The contributions to this volume reconsider many of the early interpretations and critiques of Husserl, inviting readers to assess the merits of the arguments put forward by his critics while also shedding new light on their so-called “misunderstandings” of his idealism. This text should be of interest to researchers working in the history of phenomenology and Husserlian studies. (shrink)

Over several decades, ethics and law have been applied to medical education and practice in a way that reflects the continuation during the twentieth century of the strong distinction between facts and values. We explain the development of applied ethics and applied medical law and report selected results that reflect this applied model from an empirical project examining doctors’ decisions on withdrawing/withholding treatment from patients who lack decision-making capacity. The model is critiqued, and an alternative “constitutive” model is supported on (...) the basis that medicine, medical law, and medical ethics exemplify the inevitable entanglement of facts and values. The model requires that ethics and law be taught across the medical education curriculum and integrated with the basic and clinical sciences and that they be perceived as an integral component of medical evidence and practice. Law, in particular, would rank as equal in normative authority to the relevant clinical scientific “facts” of the case, with graduating doctors having as strong a basic command of each category as the other. The normalization of legal knowledge as part of the clinician’s evidence base to be utilized in practice may provide adequate consolation for clinicians who may initially resent further perceived incursions on their traditional independence and discretion. (shrink)

In our paper ‘The ethical case for non-directed postmortem sperm donation’ we argued that it would be ethical for men to donate sperm after death for use by strangers. In their thoughtful response Fredrick and Ben Kroon lay out practical concerns regarding our proposal. They raise issues regarding the quality of sperm collected postmortem based on empirical studies. Second, they claim that concerns about quality would make women unlikely to use sperm collected after death. In this response we explore issues (...) of sperm quality in both living and dead donors. We consider whether there might be ways to ensure quality in both. Finally, we question whether quality should be a barrier to women choosing to use sperm donated after death. (shrink)

Clear and careful thinking is an indispensable aid in the pursuit of answers to the difficult ethical question faced by clinicians, patients, and families. In this issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy devoted to issues in clinical ethics, the authors engage in this enterprise by reflecting on morally good medical decision making, conscientious objection, presumed consent in organ donation, the permissibility of surrogate decision making, and the failure of legislative limits on the scope of euthanasia in Belgium.

Education has a responsibility to respond to the threat of deteriorating democracies. The post-truth era is marked by an erosion of trust in public institutions and extreme polarisation. This paper begins with an examination of the ways by which current literacy and media literacy education is not simply outmoded, but also limited by a grounding in neoliberal conceptions of rationality and individualism. Offering a counterpoint to the status quo, and foregrounding the significance of affect, I work with Levinas’s conception of (...) ethics to illustrate the tensions between affective reactionism and non-intentional affectivity, enjoyment and its disruption as a premise for intersubjectivity, and contrasting manifestations of anger. I conclude the paper with a proposal for literacy education that comprises intentional focus on relationality, responsibility, and affect. (shrink)

This paper will investigate how geographic features were recorded on maps in the eighteenth century in order to outline the construction of geographic knowledge by British mapmakers. Due to practical and economic factors, early modern cartography was a conservative practice based on source compilation and comparison. For the Pacific region especially, the paucity of first-hand observations and the conflicting nature of those observations rendered the world's largest ocean difficult to chart and prone to the retention of mythical continents, passages and (...) islands. After a discussion of the practical and economic reasons why geographic features were difficult to revise on maps, the article focuses on a case study to show how geographic enigmas could be placed and persist. It will use Pepys Island to illustrate the ways in which a chimeric feature could become instilled in geographic parlance. (shrink)

Practice guidelines are an increasingly relevant feature of health insurance. One hundred and seventy-eight million people in the United States have some form of private health insurance coverage; coverage for 150 million of them is employment-related. Traditionally, this coverage was provided by employers purchasing a group contract under which an insurance carrier provided indemnity coverage for employees—that is, the insurance company paid all usual, customary, and reasonable charges incurred by an employee for medical care, subject in some cases to an (...) annual deductible and to a percentage of covered expenses, co-paid by the employee, for each service. In recent years, however, employers in greater numbers have switched to so-called self-insurance plans in which employees’ health care claims are paid directly by the employer. (shrink)

The ‘between Wars’ period in England in the early twentieth century was extraordinary, philosophically. It was marked by a profusion of new, controversial, and revolutionary ideas. Developments in formal logic, the rise of the method of ‘analysis’, and logical atomism were already changing the face of philosophy in England. From this mix emerged two distinctive views about language and its connection to philosophical methodology: one championing the concept of an ideal language; and one rejecting this and favoring appeal to ordinary (...) language. The origin of both views is to be found in the (earlier and later) work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In this paper, I will examine the emergence of these views in relation to one another: an ideal language conception represented by A.J. Ayer in his Language, Truth and Logic, and the reaction against this conception in the early phases of ordinary language philosophy, in particular in the work of John Wisdom. (shrink)

We consider a particular attempt to justify medical research and the practice of medicine as moral imperatives; in doing this we are led into a comparison of consequential and deontological justifications of intention and action. We conclude that the justification of research and medicine is consequential.

Jacques Lacan's innovative development of Freudian psychoanalysis entails a differentiation between registers of the "symbolic," "imaginary," and "real," and then an analysis of the way these three registers are held together as three rings of the "Borromean knot." This work is taken a significant step further in his 1975-76 Seminar XXIII, and is sometimes thought to mark the shift to a "later Lacan.,, The seminar shifts its focus from "symptom" (as a coded message to the Other, repetitively sent even unbeknownst (...) to the subject) to the "sinthome" as a device by which the subject configures and is configured by a little circuit of messages. The Borromean knot is now seen as held together in some circumstances by the " sinthome." In this paper I explore what Lacan has to say about language, the Borromean knot, James Joyce, and God, and then turn to explore the place of symptoms, "sinthomes" and psychoanalysis itself in relation to psychiatry and contemporary culture. This paper is in two parts. In the first I review main lines of argument in Seminar XXIII, and then in the second part I embed Lacan's account in the broader cultural processes in which our clinical work must be read in order to be rewritten. (shrink)

While ethical conflicts in the provision of healthcare are common, the current third-party mediator model is limited by a lack of expert ethical mediators, who are often not on site when conflict escalates. In order to improve clinical outcomes in situations such as conflicts at the end of life, we suggest that clinicians—physicians, nurses and social workers—be trained to prevent and deescalate emerging conflicts. This can be achieved using a mediation model framed by a communication-training approach. A case example is (...) presented and the model is discussed. The implication of this preventative/early intervention model for improving clinical outcomes, in particular end-of life conflict, is considered. (shrink)

Prenatal Diagnosis (PD) includes diagnostic procedures carried out during the antenatal period, together with Preconception Screening (PS) of prospective parents, and prenatal genetic diagnosis (PGD). The purpose of all these procedures is to provide prospective parents with opportunities to decide whether or not to have a child who will be diseased or disabled. Selection decisions determine what kinds of children are brought into existence; the ability to make these decisions is of huge ethical significance. It raises connected questions about discrimination, (...) the social status of disabled people and the medicalisation of disability; patient vulnerability and the power of the medical and counselling professions to influence decision-making; and the conceptualisation of selection as a public health measure and even as eugenic. In this paper, I outline the ethical issues raised by prenatal diagnosis and describe some of the arguments which have been elaborated in relation to the permissibility of selecting against (and occasionally for) diseases and disabilities. I conclude that there are no good arguments against the prevention of disability through PD but that providing adequate information for decision-making and facilitating uncoerced individual decisions requires further attention. (shrink)

The phrase "applied ethics" has lost much of the charm it initially had for philosophers. Alasdair MacIntyre, Tom Beauchamp, and others pointed out a decade ago that it is a mistake to think of ethics as a body of theory that can be carted in, when necessary, to sort out some particularly messy real-world moral dilemma.(1) According to these critics' line of thought there may be good reasons to distinguish pure from applied mathematics, for example, but ethics is not (and (...) should not pretend to be) the same sort of inquiry as mathematics. Every time we advertise a course in applied ethics, we implicitly suggest a separation between theory and practice. This separation rings especially false for those of us whose philosophical orientation derives from the work of the classical American pragmatists. In this paper I want to discuss a conception of applied ethics -- call it "applying ethics" -- that is rooted in pragmatic philosophy, and to suggest a kind of practice which I think could be quite valuable both for society at large and for the society of philosophers concerned with ethics. (shrink)

Henri de Lubac’s treatment of the relationship between nature and grace will be critiqued by Herman Bavinck’s ‘grace restores nature’ theme. In two significant addresses, Bavinck critiqued a Roman Catholic approach to nature and grace. De Lubac’s influence upon Roman Catholic thinking addressing nature and grace occurred post-Bavinck and has altered Catholic thinking on the subject. Neo-Calvinist scholar, Wolter Huttinga admits that Bavinck and de Lubac offer similar critiques of Roman Catholicism. The question remains then, do Bavinck’s critiques still hold? (...) I propose that Bavinck’s account of grace restores nature still makes valid critiques of a post-Vatican II construction of nature and grace. The paper is broken into three sections: an exploration of de Lubac’s nature and grace theme, the framework of Bavinck’s ‘grace restores nature’ theme, and a Bavinckian critique of de Lubac’s nature and grace theme. (shrink)

They enterin curves and stoopslimping and tappinga file of bare armscreased faces upliftedred eyelids poutingeyes curtained in cataract.The syringes are magazined at his hip.A pinch of skinin a chill autumn morninga stinging spreads outat the borders of shouldersthe grim supplicationfor all his attentionthe trembling smileon his remembering a name.Swabs spent in bucketsthe names all collecteda shifting and amblingacross the lawns to their liveson small porchesand in dim echoing cells.Washing his handsof the short easy morningthose bird-bone armsgrow stars of Davidin the (...) injected whealsand the upturned headspull at his neckfor a sparklet of mercyhe prodding them downinto the frostfrom the stinking trainsat the point of more serious weaponry.They are a herdfanning out to their winding down daysdark-eyed ones shuffling blindto other deaths, gassed and limed. (shrink)

Lloyd (2009) contends that climate models are confirmed by various instances of fit between their output and observational data. The present paper argues that what these instances of fit might confirm are not climate models themselves, but rather hypotheses about the adequacy of climate models for particular purposes. This required shift in thinking—from confirming climate models to confirming their adequacy-for-purpose—may sound trivial, but it is shown to complicate the evaluation of climate models considerably, both in principle and in practice.