In the field of health technology assessment, there are several approaches that can be used for ethical analysis. However, there is a scarcity of literature that critically evaluates and compares the strength and weaknesses of these approaches when they are applied in practice. In this paper, we analyse the applicability of some selected approaches for addressing ethical issues in HTA in the field of complex health interventions. Complex health interventions have been the focus of methodological attention in HTA. However, the (...) potential methodological challenges for ethical analysis are as yet unknown.Six of the most frequently described and applied ethical approaches in HTA were critically assessed against a set of five characteristics of complex health interventions: multiple and changing perspectives, indeterminate phenomena, uncertain causality, unpredictable outcomes, and ethical complexity. The assessments are based on literature and the authors’ experiences of developing, applying and assessing the approaches.The Interactive, participatory HTA approach is by its nature and flexibility, applicable across most complexity characteristics. Wide Reflective Equilibrium is also flexible and its openness to different perspectives makes it better suited for complex health interventions than more rigid conventional approaches, such as Principlism and Casuistry. Approaches developed for HTA purposes are fairly applicable for complex health interventions, which one could expect because they include various ethical perspectives, such as the HTA Core Model® and the Socratic approach.This study shows how the applicability for addressing ethical issues in HTA of complex health interventions differs between the selected ethical approaches. Knowledge about these differences may be helpful when choosing and applying an approach for ethical analyses in HTA. We believe that the study contributes to increasing awareness and interest of the ethical aspects of complex health interventions in general. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that object properties are processed faster when they follow properties from the same perceptual modality than properties from different modalities. These findings suggest that language activates sensorimotor processes, which, according to those studies, can only be explained by a modal account of cognition. The current paper shows how a statistical linguistic approach of word co-occurrences can also reliably predict the category of perceptual modality a word belongs to (auditory, olfactory–gustatory, visual–haptic), even though the statistical linguistic approach (...) is less precise than the modal approach (auditory, gustatory, haptic, olfactory, visual). Moreover, the statistical linguistic approach is compared with the modal embodied approach in an experiment in which participants verify properties that share or shift modalities. Response times suggest that fast responses can best be explained by the linguistic account, whereas slower responses can best be explained by the embodied account. These results provide further evidence for the theory that conceptual processing is both linguistic and embodied, whereby less precise linguistic processes precede precise simulation processes. (shrink)

Stress in health care is affected by moral factors. When people are prevented from doing ‘good’ they may feel that they have not done what they ought to or that they have erred, thus giving rise to a troubled conscience. Empirical studies show that health care personnel sometimes refer to conscience when talking about being in ethically difficult everyday care situations. This study aimed to construct and validate the Stress of Conscience Questionnaire (SCQ), a nine-item instrument for assessing stressful situations (...) and the degree to which they trouble the conscience. The items were based on situations previously documented as causing negative stress for health care workers. Content and face validity were established by expert panels and pilot studies that selected relevant items and modified or excluded ambiguous ones. A convenience sample of 444 health care personnel indicated that the SCQ had acceptable validity and internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha exceeded 0.83 for the overall scale). Explorative factor analysis identified and labelled two factors: ‘internal demands’ and ‘external demands and restrictions’. The findings suggest that the SCQ is a concise and practical instrument for use in various health care contexts. (shrink)

Those who find their work meaningful often need to be more committed. Over-commitment, in turn, frequently results in stress, personal conflicts, and burnout. Such over-commitment, in other words, leads to employees needing to take more care of themselves. This paper considers the prospects for meaningful self-care in the context of working time reduction. For this, we consider the case of the four-day workweek, asking employees of such organizations to explain how they make meaning out of their newly found time off. (...) Conceptually, we rely upon the work of Michel Foucault, particularly his analysis of the care of the self. On its basis, we coded five self-care practices: (1) rest and recuperation, (2) professional and personal development, (3) domestic work, (4) balancing work, and (5) additional work. We conclude by highlighting the theoretical and practical implications of work reduction for the analytical, ethical, and practical pursuit of meaningful work. (shrink)

Dans la première partie duParménide, Socrate présente une théorie des Formes qui explique la comprésence d’opposés dans les choses ordinaires et soutient que les Formes ne peuvent avoir des caractéristiques opposées. Dans la deuxième partie, Parménide s’appuie sur les propos de Socrate; il en dérive des conséquences inacceptables — que la Forme de l’Un n’existe pas, et ainsi, que rien n’existe. Cette conclusion est indéniablement fausse. Pour éviter ceci, Socrate doit abandonner la thèse exposée dans la première partie et trouver (...) une manière de préserver la fonction explicative des Formes. Cet article expose la structure de l’exercice qui occupe la deuxième partie du dialogue. (shrink)

Feminism is an antiauthoritarian movement that has sought to unmask many traditional “authorities” as ungrounded. Given this, it might seem as if feminists are required to abandon the concept of authority altogether. But, we argue, the exercise of authority enables us to coordinate our efforts to achieve larger social goods and, hence, should be preserved. Instead, what is needed and what we provide for here is a way to distinguish legitimate authority from objectionable authoritarianism.

An important, yet little explored, area of feminist research is women's subjective experience of everyday life. Claiming Reality is the first study to apply the insights of the growing discipline of phenomenological sociology to women's experience, particularly the experience of childbirth, in an attempt to develop a feminist phenomenological perspective.

There is a strong tendency in both theory and practice to view education’s democratic role as that of equipping students with specific attributes presumed necessary for democratic life. Discussions thus center around identifying the required values, skills, and capabilities, as well as the types of educational endeavors that best foster them. What underpins such discussions is the assumption that the child is inherently lacking, which, I argue, leads to a conceptual dead end. In this article, I explore how the concept (...) of childism can expand the epistemological framework for understanding and theorizing education’s democratic role. Using theoretical concepts from Biesta and Rancière’s sporadic democracy, along with Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice, I discuss a case from a Danish state school where a teacher harasses a student. I argue that the perception of the child as a deficit being causes children to suffer systemic epistemic (and other) injustices, as incidents of adults harassing children can go unnamed and unrecognized. The potential long-term harm is a loss of trust in one’s ability to know, interpret, and understand the world. I argue that this is also a loss in potential claims for equality based on the perception of injustice, a loss that damages the democratic quality of society. The article advocates a childist turn in research on education’s democratic role. Childism enables a hermeneutical breakthrough that can spark new discussions of scholarly, social, and political norms regarding the question of democracy and education. (shrink)

I argue that psychiatric researchers, clinicians, and the wider public actively regulate the minds of individuals with mental disorder through the prescriptive processes of mind-shaping (see Andrews in South J Philos 53:50–67, 2015a; Andrews in Philos Explor 18(2):282–296, 2015b; McGeer, in: Folk psychology re-assessed, Springer, Berlin, 2007; McGeer in Philos Explor 18:259–281, 2015; Mameli in Biol Philos 16(5):595–626, 2001; Zawidzki in Philos Explor 11(3):193–210, 2008; Zawidzki, in: Kiverstein (ed) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind, Taylor and Francis (...) Group, London, 2016). Consequently, all those with a vested interest in the language of mental disorder should take a critical and dialogical approach in how concepts of psychopathology are developed, disseminated and used. Mind-shaping describes how our folk-psychological categorizations actively regulate the behaviour of those categorized. This is done through setting certain norms, which can be achieved through the application of folk-psychological concepts. I argue that psychiatry has embedded norms and goals in its activities that are non-epistemic in nature and these are not only bound up in disorder concepts, but also in the social roles that clinicians, researchers and patients play. In this way, psychiatry uses folk-psychological type tools for the social understanding of individuals with mental disorder, and the application of these tools also helps it meet these non-epistemic goals. Given this, I characterise psychiatry as partaking in mind-shaping. When we characterise psychiatry as mind-shaping, we are then able to explain occurrences of looping effects between disorder categories and individuals categorized (Haslam in J Psychopathol 22(1):4–9, 2016) and provide a theoretical basis for the occurrence of hermeneutical injustice in the field of mental health. (shrink)

This chapter addresses major tendencies in the history of academic French historiographies of philosophy, from the establishment of history of philosophy as a university discipline in the early nineteenth century to feminist critiques of the philosophical canon in the twentieth century. Focusing on the ways in which the philosophical character of the history of philosophy has been conceptualised, it argues that the history of the historiography of philosophy in France is marked in two ways by the intellectual legacy of Victor (...) Cousin. At the level of canon-formation, this history has involved continuity and reproduction of those authors and texts which Cousin regarded as central to the history of philosophy. At the level of theoretical accounts of the relation between the practice and the past of philosophy, this history has involved discontinuity and the contestation of the spiritualist eclectic framework within which Cousin himself accounted for this relation. With feminist historiographies of philosophy, the theory-constitutive function of the canon itself comes into question, thus opening a new field of inquiry as to what should be counted as properly ‘philosophical’. (shrink)

The Sophist and Statesman are late Platonic dialogues, whose relative dates are established by their stylistic similarity to the Laws, a work that was apparently still “on the wax” at the time of Plato's death (Diogenes Laertius III.37). These dialogues are important in exhibiting Plato'sviews on method and metaphysics after he criticized his own most famous contribution to the history of philosophy, the theory of separate, immaterial forms, in the Parmenides. The Statesman also offers a transitional statement of Plato's political (...) philosophy between the Republic and the Laws. The Sophist and Statesman show the author's increasing interest in mundane and practical knowledge. In this respect they seem more down-to-earth and Aristotelian in tone than dialogues dated to Plato's middle period like the Phaedo and the Republic. This essay will focus on method and metaphysics. (shrink)

Claiming Reality is the first study to apply the insights of the growing discipline of phenomenological sociology to women's experience, particularly the experience of childbirth, in an attempt to develop a feminist phenomenological perspective.

Today many homes are accessible from afar, with mobile phones functioning as remote controls for technologies within the home. In this article we propose the ‘leaky home’ as a conceptual figure to understand how automated homes that leak through connected devices and sensors that collect, transmit, receive and share data are experienced and sensed by bodies within these distributed spaces. The leak brings together postmodern metaphors of fluidity and the 21st century discourse of information leaks, while maintaining infrastructural connotations of (...) substances that shift domain in very tangible ways. By looking at a series of examples from media accounts and research conducted in Denmark, the UK, the USA and Australia, ranging from everyday family practices to digital coercive control, we explore how the care-control complex of the home is impacted by its leaky nature. (shrink)

This article engages with A’s “Crop Rotation” in Either/Or—the “boredom” essay—as a source for serious thought on the modern crisis of faith. Exploring A’s portrayal of the modern subject as isolated and self-enclosed, a “bored” condition linked to its radical autonomy and self-directed existence, it suggests that A’s explanation for this condition still holds today: modern humans’ self-assertion (and hence self-isolation) emerges as a response to a profound loss of meaning. Through an existential reading of A’s essay, it highlights A’s (...) notion of “demonic pantheism” as illuminating what lies behind boredom, namely, a relatable experience of disillusionment following the loss of meaning—in other words, “existential doubt” or a crisis of faith. (shrink)

Public and academic discourse about big data and digital technologies in agriculture present polarizing visions of the future of food, but it is still unclear whether and to what degree farmers are taking up the narratives of proponents or critics. Building on the sociotechnical imaginaries literature, we characterize and analyze farmer imaginaries about digital agricultural technologies. We present the findings from a survey of farmers in Canada (n = 1000). To study imaginaries, the survey uses both affective image analysis and (...) an original scale with a spectrum of possible scenarios for ten key aspects of agri-food futures (e.g., labour shortages, robotics and automation, food security, and sustainability). Canadian farmers’ imaginaries simultaneously include both negative and positive views. Respondents have extremely positive top-of-mind affective associations to digital agricultural technologies. However, overall, respondents are only very mildly optimistic when anticipating the future impacts of digital agricultural technologies at the farm-level and have more pessimistic views on how these tools will impact the agriculture sector more broadly. Our analysis reveals three core narratives in the farmer sociotechnical imaginary about digital agricultural technologies: (1) a feeling of ‘winner takes all’ and exacerbating power imbalances and disparity, (2) a belief that these tools are essential to grow more food on less land with fewer environmental impacts, and (3) faith that farmers and robots can work in harmony. This research contributes to the growing global body of scholarship on farmer experiences with data and digital technologies with a new way of studying sociotechnical imaginaries. (shrink)

Within the last decade, a growing number of artists, media activists and theorists have been engaged with the potential of the glitch – with processes and aesthetics that arise from visual errors in digital technologies. But glitches also offer clues to understanding normative knowledge and power systems, and to challenge these. This is relevant in critical approaches to photography and its historical role in forming, controlling and colonizing systems as well as conventional understandings of the medium as a transparent window (...) onto the world/reality. In this introduction we outline our approach to the glitch in the artistic and curatorial research project ‘Photography and the Glitch’, to which the contributors to this issue have contributed in various ways. (shrink)

Research into people’s comprehension of novel noun-noun phrases has long neglected the possible influences of prosody during meaning construction. At the same time, work in conceptual combination has disagreed about whether different classes of interpretation emerge from single or multiple processes; for example, whether people use distinct mechanisms when they interpret octopus apartment as property-based (e.g., an apartment with eight rooms) or relation-based (e.g., an apartment where an octopus lives). In two studies, we manipulate the prosodic emphasis patterns of novel (...) noun-noun combinations (placing stress on the modifier noun, the head noun, or dual stress on both nouns) and ask participants to generate an interpretation for the novel phrase. Results show that people are faster to generate property-based interpretations when dual emphasis stresses both nouns equally, with prosody having little effect on the speed of relation-based interpretations. These findings highlight a role for prosody during meaning construction and underline important differences between relation- and property-based interpretations that are difficult to reconcile with unitary process views of conceptual combination. (shrink)

Background: Fear of cancer recurrence or progression is a common challenge experienced by people living with and beyond cancer and is frequently endorsed as the highest unmet psychosocial need amongst survivors. This has prompted many cancer organizations to develop self-help resources for survivors to better manage these fears through psychoeducation, but little is known about whether they help reduce FCR/P.Method: We recruited 62 women with ovarian cancer. Women reported on their medical history and demographic characteristics and completed the Fear of (...) Progression Questionnaire-Short Form. They then read a booklet on FCR specifically created for Ovarian Cancer Australia by two of the authors. One week after reading the booklet, 50/62 women completed the FoP-Q-SF and answered questions about their satisfaction with the booklet.Results: More than half of the women scored in the clinical range for FCR/P at baseline. Of the completers, 93% said that they would recommend the booklet to other women. Satisfaction with the booklet was relatively high and more than two-thirds of women rated it as moderately helpful or better. However, FCR/P did not change significantly over the week following reading the booklet [t = 1.71, p = 0.09]. There was also no difference in change in FCR/P between women in the clinical vs. non-clinical range on the FoP-Q. Women high in FCR/P rated the booklet as less helpful in managing FCR/P, but overall satisfaction with the booklet was not associated with degree of FCR/P.Conclusions: These results suggest that a simple online FCR booklet is acceptable to women with ovarian cancer and they are satisfied with the booklet, but, it was insufficient to change in FCR/P levels. These results suggest that such resources are valued by women with ovarian cancer, but more potent interventions are necessary to reduce FCR in this population. (shrink)

Allan Bell calls on hermeneutics to enliven the relation between discourse analysts and the materials they study, exploring the image of the analyst ‘standing before’ a corpus, prepared to be transformed by it. The ingredient of desire must be added to the account, as well as the embodied scenario of interpretation. These elements are mobilized to situate Bell’s rereading of Babel and of empire.

In this thesis I develop an account of how processes of social understanding are implicated in experiences of mental disorder, critiquing the lack of examination of this phenomena along the way. First, I demonstrate how disorder concepts, as developed and deployed by psychiatric institutions, have the effect of shaping the cognition of individuals with psychopathology through setting expectations. Such expectation-setting can be harmful in some cases, I argue, and can perpetuate epistemic injustices. Having developed this view, I criticise enactive accounts (...) of mental disorder for failing to consider how such terms like ‘dysfunction’ are open to interpretation and can come embedded with normative expectations. Enactive accounts consequently run the risk of perpetuating injustices in their account of the sociality of mental disorder. Similar concerns arise when we consider the attachment of enactivism to the medical model, I argue. But by adapting enactivism to consider other experiences of disorder, such as those described as ‘madness’, enactive psychiatry may genuinely provide ethical groundwork for a better conception of disordered experience. Then, I consider a further concern with a distinctly medicalised conception of mental disorder from the perspective of self-illness ambiguity, arguing that self-illness ambiguities appear to form a special class of ambiguities due to their proximity to disorder concepts which mark them as appropriate targets for therapeutic treatment. However, I argue further that we should be critical of the idea that self-illness ambiguities necessitate disambiguation, as, in cases where self and illness are demarcated, individuals may still experience distress because simply having a mental disorder can be socially alienating. The medicalised focus in self-illness ambiguity, and the explicit need from the medical perspective to disambiguate it, might then exacerbate the distress someone experiences in mental disorder. Moreover, drawing on Mad Studies, I suggest that one might not need a coherent self-narrative to live well. Because of this, one may not need to adopt a medicalised view of the self in the case of selfillness ambiguity. In order to support this analysis, I provide a phenomenological account of language and argue that the very thoughts implicated in mental disorder shape the individual’s perception of the world due to the way that language foregrounds particular aspects of our world. This demands a critical examination of the language adopted and used by both clinicians and disordered individuals. I thus conclude with some thoughts on how to approach research and developing understanding of mental disorder given that we, as people, are always implicated in this process and therefore socialisation of some kind will always be taking place. (shrink)

Récemment, dans The Problem of the Criterion, Roderick M. Chisholm distinguait deux stratégies visant à résoudre le problème du cercle vicieux, à savoir, celle des «particularistes» pour lesquels il faut d'abord établir ce qu'on sait, partant, formuler les criteres de la connaissance et celle des « méthodistes » qui entendent établir d'abord les critères de la connaissance, partant, son étendue. Voici done notre problème formulé, puisque Chisholm considère Descartes comme un exemple de stratégic «méthodiste» et Thomas Reid ainsi que G.E. (...) Moore comme des exemples de stratégie «particulariste», ces derniers illustrant d'ailleurs la stratégie «la plus raisonnable». Dans le cas de Reid cependant, on verra que même s'il se livre à une critique de la démarche cartésienne, la tentative de réponse au problème du cercle vicieux est chez lui aussi de type «méthodiste», dès lors, susceptible d'une circularité comparable à celle qu'il reproche à Descartes. (shrink)

Le mot célèbre de Descartes sur le bon sens a fait l’objet de commentaires antithétiques mettant en évidence soit son ironie , soit son démocratisme. Les philosophes du sens commun avaient néanmoins entrevu une autre interprétation qui mettait l’accent sur le concept d’égalité épistémique et son rapport à la méthode. À la lumière du texte même du Discours de la Méthode, il est montré que la thèse de l’ironie interprète à contre-sens la distinction cartésienne entre l’égalité des raisons et l’égalité (...) des esprits, dans la mesure où c’est pour avoir consenti à l’élitisme épistémologique combattu par Descartes que l’homme de bon sens peut en venir à douter de l’universalité de la raison.Descartes’ well-known saying on good sense has been commented in two antithetical perspectives, one emphasizing its irony , the other, its democratism. Common sense philosophers have already offered an alternative reading, focussing on the concept of epistemic equality and its relationship to the Cartesian method. On the basis of the Discours de la Méthode itself, it is shown that the allegation of irony counterfeits Descartes’ distinction between the equality of reasons and the equality of minds, to the extent that it is in consenting to the epistemological elitism rejected by Descartes that men of good sense could be lead to doubting the universality of human reason. (shrink)

En parlant des rapports entre la Nouvelle Rhétorique et la France, Pierre-André Taguieff décrivait la situation comme celle d'un rendez-vous manqué. En parlant des rapports entre la philosophie pérelmanienne et la philosophie anglo-saxonne, il faut surtout parler de rendez-vous clandestins. Car dans l'ensemble, ces rendez-vous divers sont d'autant plus évidents qu'ils témoignent sans doute de l'influence réelle d'une philosophie. D'une philosophie dont on retrouve, dans le milieu anglo-saxon, un «air de famille» mais sans que Chaïm Perelman ne soit expressément nommé.

Dans les études consacrées aux écrits politiques et éducatifs de Rousseau, on a beaucoup insisté sur la loi qui commande son anthropologie, à savoir que l'altérité corrompt. Cependant, on a moins insisté sur une notion fondamentale de cette anthropologie, celle des bornes et des places, ce qui explique un certain nombre de malentendus quant au caractère plus ou moins pessimiste ou conser vateur des écrits de Rousseau. Pourtant, un lien existe entre la loi de l'altérité et le concept des bornes, (...) car ne corrompt chez Rousseau que le type de comparaisons qui refusent l'ordre d'un tout et qui, de ce fait, situent l'individualité et l'altérité en dehors de leurs bornes. (shrink)

This article marks a decisive step towards the recovery of the French woman writer, journalist, and aviation pioneer Louise Faure-Favier, who today is virtually forgotten. The article begins by sit...