This is the first complete, one-volume English translation of the ancient Chinese text Xunzi, one of the most extensive, sophisticated, and elegant works in the tradition of Confucian thought. Through essays, poetry, dialogues, and anecdotes, the Xunzi articulates a Confucian perspective on ethics, politics, warfare, language, psychology, human nature, ritual, and music, among other topics. Aimed at general readers and students of Chinese thought, Eric Hutton's translation makes the full text of this important work more accessible in English than (...) ever before. Named for its purported author, the Xunzi has long been neglected compared to works such as the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius. Yet interest in the Xunzi has grown in recent decades, and the text presents a much more systematic vision of the Confucian ideal than the fragmented sayings of Confucius and Mencius. In one famous, explicit contrast to them, the Xunzi argues that human nature is bad. However, it also allows that people can become good through rituals and institutions established by earlier sages. Indeed, the main purpose of the Xunzi is to urge people to become as good as possible, both for their own sakes and for the sake of peace and order in the world. In this edition, key terms are consistently translated to aid understanding and line numbers are provided for easy reference. Other features include a concise introduction, a timeline of early Chinese history, a list of important names and terms, cross-references, brief explanatory notes, a bibliography, and an index. (shrink)

Volume 27, Issue 4, July 2019, Page 673-683.

The health care needs of rural populations often differ from those of their urban counterparts. And the ethical dilemmas that caregivers face are distinctively shaped in rural settings, not only by resource constraints, but by the nature of life in small, close-knit communities as well.

This paper examines the ethics of using assistive technology such as video surveillance in the homes of people living with dementia. Ideation and concept elaboration around the introduction of a camera-based surveillance service in the homes of people with dementia, typically living alone, is explored. The paper reviews relevant literature on surveillance of people living with dementia, and summarises the findings from ideation and concept elaboration workshops, designed to capture the views of those involved in the care of people living (...) with dementia at home. The research question relates to the ethical considerations of using assistive technologies that include video surveillance in the homes of people living with dementia, and the implications for a person living with dementia whenever video surveillance is used in their home and access to the camera is given to the person’s family. The review of related work indicated that such video surveillance may result in loss of autonomy or freedom for the person with dementia. The workshops reflected the findings from the related work, and revealed useful information to inform the service design, in particular in fine-tuning the service to find the best relationship between privacy and usefulness. Those who took part in the workshops supported the concept of the use of camera in the homes of people living with dementia, with some significant caveats around privacy. The research carried out in this work is small in scale but points towards an acceptance by many caregivers of people living with dementia of surveillance technologies. This paper indicates that those who care for people living with dementia at home are willing to make use of camera technology and therefore the value of this work is to help shed light on the direction for future research. (shrink)

Background: Nurse managers are responsible for solving work-related ethical problems to promote a positive ethical culture in healthcare organizations. Objectives: The aim of this study was to describe the activities that nurse managers use to solve work-related ethical problems. The ultimate aim was to enhance the ethical awareness of all nurse managers. Research Design: The data for this descriptive cross-sectional survey were analyzed through inductive content analysis and quantification. Participants and research context: The data were collected in 2011 using a (...) questionnaire that included an open-ended question and background factors. Participants were nurse managers working in Finnish healthcare organizations (n = 122). Ethical considerations: Permission for the study was given by the Finnish Association of Academic Managers and Experts of Health Sciences. Findings: Nurse managers identified a variety of activities they use to solve work-related ethical problems: discussion (30%), cooperation (25%), work organization (17%), intervention (10%), personal values (9%), operational models (4%), statistics and feedback (4%), and personal examples (1%). However, these activities did not follow any common or systematic model. Discussion and conclusion: In the future, nurse managers need a more systematic approach to solve ethical problems. It is important to establish new kinds of ethics structures in organizations, such as a common, systematic ethical decision-making model and an ethics club for nurse manager problems, to support nurse managers in solving work-related ethical problems. (shrink)

With their common focus on narrative, literary scholars and historians of science share a close relationship with language and can offer each other valuable interpretive insights. Particularly revealing in each field are scientists' and literary writers' changing uses of metaphor, which is critical to each kind of scholarship since both disciplines place such a high value on cultural context. Any cross‐disciplinary help, however, needs to take into account the essential differences between the fields: contrasting views of what constitutes evidence and (...) varying relationships with the past. Since both kinds of scholarship involve creating as well as analyzing narratives, each field has developed its own sense of pacing and significance, and their differing approaches to truth deserve respect. -/- . (shrink)

This article reports the results of an experiment involving 108 college students with varying backgrounds in biology. Subjects answered questions about the evolutionary history of sets of hominid and equine taxa. Each set of taxa was presented in one of three diagrammatic formats: a noncladogenic diagram found in a contemporary biology textbook or a cladogram in either the ladder or tree format. As predicted, the textbook diagrams, which contained linear components, were more likely than the cladogram formats to yield explanations (...) of speciation as an anagenic process, a common misconception among students. In contrast, the branching cladogram formats yielded more appropriate explanations concerning levels of ancestry than did the textbook diagrams. Although students with stronger backgrounds in biology did better than those with weaker biology backgrounds, they generally showed the same effects of diagrammatic format. Implications of these results for evolution education and for diagram design more generally are discussed. (shrink)

Based on the notion of time translation, we develop a formalism to deal with the logic of quantum properties at different times. In our formalism it is possible to enlarge the usual notion of context to include composed properties involving properties at different times. We compare our results with the theory of consistent histories.

En el presente trabajo nos proponemos reflexionar acerca de las posibilidades, límites y desafíos que se presentan en la práctica docente cuando jóvenes de sectores subalternos emprenden la tarea de escribir sus propias historias. Estas reflexiones surgen a partir de una experiencia pedagógica desarrollada en el marco del Programa Pueblos Originarios y Escuelas Rurales de la UNCuyo. Consideramos que la fragmentación y la discontinuidad es un rasgo de la memoria colectiva de los sectores subalternos, sin embargo, en ocasiones encuentra espacios (...) para expresarse y tensionar la historia oficial. En esa dirección, en esta ocasión, decidimos convertir nuestros espacios curriculares en ámbitos de reflexión personal y colectiva donde los y las subalternos (parafraseando a la filósofa india Gayatri Spivak) “pudieron hablar”, para luego plasmar sus historias en fanzines. (shrink)

Todo Estado de Derecho moderno tiene su fundamento en ciertos principios que rigen la manera en cómo se ejerce el Poder Público, y es el modo en que efectivamente se aplican, lo que ciertamente determinará la naturaleza y característica de dicho Estado. En el caso venezolano, tales principios se encuentran expresamente plasmados en nuestra Carta Magna y son: El principio de competencia administrativa, el principio de legalidad, el principio de separación y colaboración entre los poderes y el principio de responsabilidad (...) del Estado y sus funcionarios. La intención es definir y desarrollar brevemente estos principios, a fin de poder establecer las características del Estado Venezolano, desde el punto de vista Constitucional (positivo) y desde el punto de vista real. Palabras clave: Principios constitucionales; Responsabilidad del Estado; Competencia; Legalidad; Separación de poderes. Constitutional principles concerning the exercise of public power.Every modern law-ruled State has its foundation on certain principles which govern theway Public Power is exercised. It is the manner in which those principles are in fact applied what will actually determine the nature and characteristics of such a State. In Venezuela’s case such principles are explicitly presented in our Constitution. They are: the principle of administrative competence, the principle of legality, the principle of separation and cooperation between powers and the principle of responsibility of the State and its officials. The aim is to define and briefly unfold these principles, so as to establish the characteristics of the Venezuelan State, both from the Constitutional (positive) and reality standpoints. Keywords : Constitutional Principles; State Responsibility; Competence; Legality; Separation of Powers. (shrink)

This article is intended as a critique of recent theorizations of sexuality and desire, which have led performative theorists to contend that gender is an effect of discourse, and sex an effect of gender. It results from informal discussions between the three authors on the mechanisms through which sexuality gets objectified in modernity. The ideas of influential Western thinkers (in particular Georges Bataille) are confronted with field data on sexuality - as lived and imagined - that the authors have been (...) gathering in Amazonian societies, Trinidad, and on the Internet. Ethnographic data and Western theories about the nature of eroticism are used to argue that the utopian definition of sexuality as sexual desire and will to identity is too divorced from the mundane - love, domesticity and reproduction in a broad sense - and based on a too limited sphere of social experience. Consequently, to apply this definition to how and why humans engage in sexual activity leads to erroneous generalizations. For when encountered ethnographically, sexuality consists of practices deeply embedded in relational contexts. The article concludes with the proposition that debates about the possibilities of human sexuality and of its political intervention will make no significant progress unless we stop repeating that `sexuality is socially constructed', and start looking at the ways in which it is lived as part of everyday social life. (shrink)

Recent studies show that psychiatry residents express a relatively greater need for ethics curricula than their colleagues in other specialties. Such studies have been limited in their generalizability because they were conducted at one site. This study of 151 psychiatry residents at seven U.S. psychiatry programs aims to address that limitation. Residents were surveyed on issues pertaining to ethics and professionalism education. Participants were found to support such curricula during training and to value its relevance to the practice of psychiatry. (...) Gender differences and the influence of the “hidden curriculum” on such results merit further study. (shrink)

Este ensayo analiza los riesgos y encrucijadas a que se enfrentan los distintos discursos feministas de un tiempo a esta parte. Es difícil sustraerse tanto a la tentación del victimismo como a la de una historia monumentalista de grandes heroínas, y también resulta complicado evitar pensar en una esencia femenina constituida y atravesada por unos «patrones de dominación», en palabras de Simone de Beauvoir. Más allá de códigos, prejuicios y dogmas, el libro de Laura Llevadot establece un ilustrador mapa (...) del feminismo contemporáneo, se enfrenta a las trampas de un lenguaje heredado que nos impide pensar por cuenta propia y, finalmente, nos impulsa a «desnaturalizar» cuanto de artificial y construido hay en la diferencia sexual. (shrink)

Examining the health of the population of the industrial world, the authors conclude that it is no healthier than it used to be, rather that diseases have been substituted, not eliminated. They suggest an alternative approach to health care which derives from a philosophy of nature.

The burden of this piece is to draw together into a coherent whole the somewhat diverse strands of Israel Scheffler's thought on the philosophy of religion. Extrapolating from personal discussions with Professor Scheffler, various of his books, articles, and other unpublished materials authored and kindly provided by him, I contend that he adumbrates a post-empiricist rendering of religious belief which masterfully avoids some philosophical problems, while unwittingly giving rise to others. Committed to the view that the methodology of science – (...) in one or other of its more acceptable guises – provides the most reliable measure of the content and structure of reality. Scheffler is bound conceptually to redefine Jewish belief in such a way that the traditional conflict between religion and science never emerges. Consistent with this end, he is concerned to divest traditional Judaism of its metaphysical garb, so that what remains are simply the matters of living to which religion ought properly on his view address itself. The Bible is thus reconceptualized as a piece of rich literature, of no real difference in logical kind to any other piece of rich literature, except that it defines uniquely, along with the Torah and other relevant Jewish literature, the history of the particular community whose perception of human values and meaningfulness forms the core of what it is to be Jewish. (shrink)

[John Rogers retired as Editor of the BJHP in March 2011. We are delighted to publish this specially commissioned appreciation of John's work by Sarah Hutton, who has been on the Editorial Board since the founding of the journal in 1993 and who was Chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy from 1998 to 2004. (Ed.)].

RNA's role in genome rearrangement. Ciliated protists, such as Oxytricha, shown, have two types of nuclei that differentiate from each other. Development in these microbial eukaryotes provides a paragon for studies of genome remodeling, with extensive use of non‐coding RNAs. On pages 84–87 of this issue, Wenwen Fang and Laura Landweber discuss how RNA‐guided processes of genome rearrangement or repair could influence other eukaryotes. Cover by Wenyi Fang. SEM images courtesy of Robert Hammersmith.

This article reflects on the ‘Philosophy and Gender’ project, which introduced the pedagogical technique known as the ‘Community of Inquiry’ into an undergraduate Gender and the Law course at the University of Western Australia. The Community of Inquiry is a pedagogy developed by Matthew Lipman in the discipline of Philosophy that facilitates collaborative and democratic philosophical thinking in the context of teaching philosophy in schools. Our project was to see if this pedagogy could advance two objectives in Gender and the (...) Law at undergraduate level: ‘reflexive thinking’ and ‘standpoint thinking’. We conclude that the Communities of Inquiry had a significant influence on the development of ‘reflexive thinking’ but appeared to have limited influence on the development of ‘standpoint thinking’. Here we provide a practitioner reflection on an exploratory new approach to teaching in a tertiary setting, with a view to setting an agenda for more systematic research in the future. (shrink)

Laura Nader is a towering figure as anthropologist, teacher, and public intellectual. Her letters give a glimpse of academic life mostly unseen by academics and by the general public. The collection includes letters from academic colleagues, but it also contains correspondence from lawyers, politicians, citizens, people on death row, Peace Corps workers, members of the military, scientists, and more.

Sarah Hutton - Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita, and: The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1650 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 261-263 Book Review Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1650 Marialuisa Baldi and Guido Canziani. Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita. Milan: Francoangeli, 1999. Pp. 589. L. 68,000. William J. Bouwsma. The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1650. New (...) Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 288. Cloth, $29.95. The two books under review represent very different approaches to Renaissance philosophy. The collection edited by Marialuisa Baldi and Guido Canziani brings together an international team of twenty-two scholars to scrutinize in close detail a single figure from among the constellation of inventive Italians whose intellectual energies fuelled the Renaissance. The Waning of the Renaissance is a single-viewpoint survey of a European-wide canvas that covers England and France as well as Italy. The subject of Girolamo Cardano is a forgotten philosopher normally only remembered, if at all, by oxymoronic recognition of his brilliance as a mathematician and fame as an astrologer. William J. Bouwsma's book is a broad overview of the mainstream Renaissance. The names that fill his pages are, in the main, the.. (shrink)

John Cottingham In the anglophone philosophical world, there has, for some time, been a curious relationship between the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophical - quiry. Many philosophers working today virtually ignore the history of their s- ject, apparently regarding it as an antiquarian pursuit with little relevance to their “cutting-edge” research. Conversely, there are historians of philosophy who seldom if ever concern themselves with the intricate technical debates that ll the journals devoted to modern analytic philosophy. Both sides are (...) surely the poorer for this strange bifurcation. For philosophy, like all parts of our intellectual culture, did not come into existence out of nowhere, but was shaped and nurtured by a long tradition; in uncovering the roots of that tradition we begin see current philoso- ical problems in a broader context and thereby enrich our understanding of their signi cance. This is surely part of the justi cation for the practice, in almost every university, of including elements from the history of philosophy as a basic part of the undergraduate curriculum. But understanding is enriched by looking forwards as well as backwards, which is why a good historian of philosophy will not just be c- cerned with uncovering ancient ideas, but will be constantly alert to how those ideas pre gure and anticipate later developments. (shrink)