Less than two decades ago, Halpern (1998) presented a convincing approach for teaching critical thought. However, nowhere in her article did she explain how to “get” faculty to teach to thinking skills to transfer across domains of knowledge using: “(a) dispositional or attitudinal component, (b) instruction in and practice with critical thought, (c) structure–training activities, and (d) a metacognitive component used to direct and assess thinking.” (p. 451) It is an open question as to what type of strategies will faculty (...) need to demonstrate to create productive, knowledgeable, thinking citizenry? In this paper I focus on the faculty’s role in promoting the teaching of critical thought, that is, critical thought processes, with particular reference to dental education. Many students can develop processes of critical thought with frequent practice involving the active use of multiple types of ill-structured problems and situations designed to require the ability (1) to recall useful information, (2) to use pattern recognition, (3) to discern pertinent information, (4) to think ahead, and (5) to anticipate outcomes and problems while (6) remaining composed enough so that their emotions do not hinder decision-making skills. (shrink)

While much emphasis is placed on the need to improve critical thinking (CT) among college students (Abrami, Bernard, Borokhovski, Wade, Surkes, Tamim, & Zhang, 2008, p. 1102), few studies describe precise methodologies for doing so (Behar-Horenstein & Niu, 2011, p. 36) and even fewer identify improvements in CT dispositions as a desired course outcome (Perkins, Tishman, Ritchhart, Donis, & Andrade, 2000, p. 288). This study attempts to fill a gap in the studies of CT methodologies aimed at improving (...) CT dispositions. In this study, 78 community college students enrolled in a CT course that emphasized targeted CT interventional strategies. The students took the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory (CCTDI) as a pre-test and as a post-test. Results indicate that the targeted instruction significantly influenced overall scores, as well as four of the seven subscale categories. (shrink)

Nursing's efforts at organizing in the United States have encompassed various approaches to creating change at a systemic and political level, namely shared governance, professional associations, and nurse unions. The United States is currently experiencing the effects of an authoritarian sociopolitical agenda that has taken aim at our profession's ethic of providing equitable care for all people through legislation that bans gender‐affirming care and abortions. Nursing is simultaneously experiencing a crisis of burnout and moral distress, as we navigate the everyday (...) functions of a for‐profit healthcare system under the Capitalocene. As we situate ourselves within these policies and practices of late‐stage capitalism and an increasingly authoritarian nation‐state, we are compelled to think deeply about how nursing is currently organizing ourselves. Our paper will explore the evolution of various forms of organizing through the lens of intersectionality, which offers a framework for considering the ways that power operates, creating a matrix of sociostructural processes that fuel injustice. Intersectionality also compels us to examine whether our organizing has resisted, or perpetuated, a matrix of oppression. We will conclude by offering examples of radical imagining for a future of nursing resistance, where our collective organizing has a greater impact and responsibility for dismantling the status quo to achieve justice and liberation. (shrink)

In his epistles, St. Paul sounded a universalism that has recently been taken up by secular philosophers who do not share his belief in Christ, but who regard his project as centrally important for contemporary political life. The Pauline project—as they see it—is the universality of truth, the conviction that what is true is true for everyone, and that the truth should be known by everyone. In this volume, eminent New Testament scholars, historians, and philosophers debate whether Paul's promise can (...) be fulfilled. Is the proper work of reading Paul to reconstruct what he said to his audiences? Is it crucial to retrieve the sense of history from the text? What are the philosophical undercurrents of Paul's message? This scholarly dialogue ushers in a new generation of Pauline studies. (shrink)

A major theme in recent psychoanalytic thinking concerns the use of therapist subjectivity, especially "countertransference," in understanding patients. This thinking converges with and expands developments in qualitative research regarding the use of researcher subjectivity as a tool to understanding, especially but not exclusively in observational and interview-based studies. Psychodynamic or psychoanalytic approaches to research add an emphasis on unconscious motivational processes in both researchers and research participants that impact research experience and data. Building upon Anglo-Saxon and continental traditions, this special (...) issue provides examples of the use of researcher subjectivity, informed by psychoanalytic thinking, in expanding research understanding. (shrink)

The traditional Western understanding of life and death as a strict dichotomy is challenged by a more descriptively accurate model of life's progressive cessation. Dying can be defined by a bounded zone of residual states of life that fits better with moral intuition and more sensitively guides action toward the dying.

This paper describes the lifeworld of one individual, Ann, in an attempt to elucidate the existential impact of early stage multiple sclerosis. Drawing on Ann's own reflections captured in a relatively unstructured interview, I construct a narrative around her first year of living with the diagnosis. Then, existential-phenomenological analysis reveals how Ann's life - lived in and through a particular body and lifeworld context - is disrupted. The unity between her body and self can no longer be taken for granted. (...) The existential possibilities inherent in her lived body are diminished and have to be renegotiated. Her sense of identity, project, relations with others and present/future plans are threatened. Ann's illness is encountered in the context of her life activities and relationships. This is the intertwining of body, self and world. To live with multiple sclerosis is to experience a global sense of disorder - a disorder which incorporates a changed relation with one's body, a transformation in the surrounding world, a threat to the self, and a change in one's relation to others. (shrink)

This is an edited collection that is intended both as a primer for core concepts and principles in research ethics and as an in-depth exploration of the contextualisation of these principles in practice across key disciplines.

The concept of the soul, one of the greatest 'inventions' of Greek philosophy, which crossed the whole history of the Western civilisation, was defined in its fundamental philosophical features by Plato. Developing the numerous issues naturally linked to this concept, Plato's thought does not only focus on metaphysical and religious themes, but also to all issues related to spirituality and the human psyche, including their ethical consequences. Therefore, the concept of soul opens the door to an endless process involving the (...) analysis of a subject's interiority. It is not by chance, that this Platonic theme recurs in many texts and even represents the backbone of whole dialogues. In this collection, some of the most important contemporary Platonic scholars looked at these complex philosophical issues from innovative perspectives, especially with regard to texts that previously were either underestimated or largely ignored. This perspective gives the reader a chance to evaluate the hermeneutic power of different approaches and interpretations of Plato's texts, revaluating as well the richness of Plato's contribution to questions that have been received and developed in contemporary philosophical reflections. (shrink)

As a companion to How to Read a Paragraph, this volume in the Thinker’s Guide Library helps students develop clear, effective and meaningful written communication skills using critical thinking tools. If you want your students to develop well reasoned papers, and improve their overall reasoning abilities, this guide is a must.

InBeing and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre affirms a circle of relations between oneself and another. This circle moves between the relations of love and desire and results from the fact that both love and desire are attempts to capture the other who always remains out of reach. Sartre denies that there can be a dialectic of such relations with others: never can there be a motivated movement beyond the frustrations and failures of each of these attempts to relate to the other. (...) The only way out of this circle is, therefore, according to Sartre, a radical conversion.Like the master in Hegel'sPhenomenology of Mind, each individual caught in this circle wants what cannot be attained: the assimilation or the negation of the freedom of the other. He is thus, like Hegel's master, impervious to any reasons that could count against what he is seeking; his failures cannot in any way motivate him to want what can be. From the point of view of such desires, any negative evaluation of these desires must seem arbitrary. Therefore, to the extent that Sartre's earlier writings indicate no other possibilities of human existence except those premised on such impossible demands, Sartre's negative evaluations concerning the bad faith of these individuals must seem arbitrary.My conclusion is not, however, simply negative since I argue that inSaint Genet Sartre presents Genet's life as a dialectical movement beyond failure to triumph. This is not a dialectic of bad faith. Rather it is a dialectic based on a very different desire from the desire for what cannot be. If Sartre thus develops another level, another fundamental desire, from which the level of bad faith can be judged to be wrong, then at least from this level the judgment is not a merely arbitrary one. (shrink)

To guide treatment decisions for incompetent patients who have no advance directives, health care institutions should look to the preferences of their own communities of patients. That is the best way to ensure that incompetent patients' wishes will be followed.

Drawing on qualitative research evidence, this article offers an interpretation of morale which focuses on individual needs fulfilment. Three conceptual areas are discussed: morale as a group or an individual phenomenon; the dimensionality of morale; and the relationship between morale and satisfaction. It is suggested that work on morale has often been weakened by misinterpretation and misapplication and that what has often been presented as morale is, in fact, group cohesiveness or job satisfaction. Inappropriate generalisation has tended to obscure the (...) intricacies of morale and greater attention should now be paid to the individuality of influential factors. Salary and working conditions may be much less influential on morale than is generally thought. More significant, it is suggested, is the extent to which the job fulfils the individual's ‘ideal’. (shrink)

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library uncovers current well-intentioned educational trends that inefficiently fragment energy and resources in our K-12 education systems. Critiquing the basic idea behind each of these fads illuminates their real motivations and provides for holistic use.

This study examined academic and psychological correlates of exam performance in an introductory logic course. The participants were 39 students who completed Logic and Critical Thinking at a southeastern liberal arts university. Students were assigned 20 online homework sets, met for two 75-minute class sessions each week for a 15-week term, and took three exams. A general self-efficacy scale and a frustration scale were administered during the last class meeting. A significant positive correlation was found between exam scores and each (...) of the following variables: homework scores, attendance, and self-efficacy scores. A significant negative correlation was found between students’ frustration scores and their exam scores. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that homework, attendance, and frustration scores made significant contributions to the prediction of exam scores. The implications of these findings for improving course design and enhancing student learning were discussed. (139 words). (shrink)

Recent debates about supererogatory rescues have sought to explain how it can be wrong to perform a suboptimal rescue although it would be permissible not to rescue at all. This paper proposes a new solution to this puzzle. It argues that existing accounts have neglected two critical considerations. First, contrary to what is commonly assumed, a rescue’s supererogatory nature has no bearing on the duties that apply to agents who rescue in supererogatory fashion. Second, we cannot justify harms caused as (...) a side effect of supererogatory rescues by appealing to the fact that it would have been permissible not to rescue at all. Ultimately, the paper proposes, the same duties that apply in cases in which rescuing is required also apply in cases in which rescuing is supererogatory. A rescue’s supererogatory nature, it turns out, is not the game changer we thought it was. (shrink)