"Science is rooted in conversations," wrote Werner Heisenberg, one of the twentieth century's great physicists. In Quantum Dialogue, Mara Beller shows that science is rooted not just in conversation but in disagreement, doubt, and uncertainty. She argues that it is precisely this culture of dialogue and controversy within the scientific community that fuels creativity. Beller draws her argument from her radical new reading of the history of the quantum revolution, especially the development of the Copenhagen interpretation. One of several (...) competing approaches, this version succeeded largely due to the rhetorical skills of Niels Bohr and his colleagues. Using extensive archival research, Beller shows how Bohr and others marketed their views, misrepresenting and dismissing their opponents as "unreasonable" and championing their own not always coherent or well-supported position as "inevitable." Quantum Dialogue, winner of the 1999 Morris D. Forkosch Prize of the Journal of the History of Ideas, will fascinate everyone interested in how stories of "scientific revolutions" are constructed and "scientific consensus" achieved. "[A]n intellectually stimulating piece of work, energised by a distinct point of view."—Dipankar Home, Times Higher Education Supplement "[R]emarkable and original. . . . [Beller's] arguments are thoroughly supported and her conclusions are meticulously argued. . . . This is an important book that all who are interested in the emergence of quantum mechanics will want to read."—William Evenson, History of Physics Newsletter. (shrink)

Interpretation of first four sutras of Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa on the basis of Śaṅkarācārya's commentary on Vedanta.

Nowadays, managing change in complex services requires that middle management re-designs its objects and professional practices, in order to cope with new needs. It seems therefore crucial to activate training settings that allow managers to: develop research and analytical skills on their own work practices and professional objects; face and manage conflict, related to every change, that represents an opportunity to reflect and review one's own practices; and build new and shared repertories of managerial practices, able to support a better (...) form of living and working together within the management community. Moving from these hypotheses, inside the setting of a training intervention conducted in an educational service, the article discusses a specific tool used to generate opportunity of exchange, and reflection, within a challenging framework of change. (shrink)

How has psychoanalysis developed in France in the years since Lacan so dramatically polarized the field? In this book, Dana Birksted-Breen and Sara Flanders of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and Alain Gibeault of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society provide an overview of how French psychoanalysis has developed since Lacan. Focusing primarily on the work of psychoanalysts from the French Psychoanalytical Association and from the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, the two British psychoanalysts view the evolution of theory as it appears to them (...) from the outside, while the French psychoanalyst explains and elaborates from inside the French psychoanalytic discourse. Seminal and representative papers have been chosen to illuminate what is special about French thinking. A substantial general introduction argues in favour of the specificity of 'French psychoanalysis', tracing its early influences and highlighting specific contemporary developments. Sections are made up of introductory material by Alain Gibeault, followed by illustrative papers in the following categories: the history of psychoanalysis in France the pioneers and their legacy the setting and the process of psychoanalysis phantasy and representation the body and the drives masculine and feminine sexuality psychosis. An excellent introduction to French psychoanalytical debate, _Reading French Psychoanalysis_ sheds a complementary light on thinking that has evolved differently in England and North America. It will be ideal reading for beginners and advanced students of clinical theory as well as experienced psychoanalysts wanting to know more about French Psychoanalytic theory, and how it has developed. (shrink)

Psychoanalysts working in clinical situations are constantly confronted with the struggle between conservative forces and those which enable something new to develop. Continuity and change, stasis and transformation, are the major themes discussed in _The Work of Psychoanalysis_, and address the fundamental question: How does and how can change take place? _The Work of Psychoanalysis_ explores the underlying coherence of the complex linked issues of theory and practice. Drawing on clinical cases from her own experience in the consulting room Dana (...) Birksted-Breen focuses on what takes place between patient and analyst, giving a picture of the interlocking and overlapping vertices that make up the work needed in psychoanalysis. Some of the key topics covered include: sexuality; aspects of female identity; eating disorders; time; dreams; disturbances in modalities of thought; and terminating psychoanalysis. This book draws different traditions into a coherent theoretical position with consequences for the mode of working analytically. _The Work of Psychoanalysis_ will appeal to psychoanalysts and academics in psychoanalysis, psychotherapists, as well as postgraduate students studying courses in these fields. (shrink)

The global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has considerably accelerated the adoption of teleconsultation—a form of consultation between patient and health care professional that occurs via videoconferencing platforms. For this reason, it is important to investigate the way in which this form of interaction modifies the nature of the clinical encounter and the extent to which this modification impacts the healing process. For this purpose, I will refer to insights into the clinical encounter as a face-to-face encounter drawn from the (...) phenomenology of medicine (R. Zaner, K. Toombs, E. Pellegrino). I will also take into account a criticism that has been expressed by various contemporary phenomenologists (H. Dreyfus, T. Fuchs, L. Dolezal, H. Carel), namely, that due to the lack of physical proximity to the other in all types of online encounters, such encounters lack significant features that are present in face-to-face encounters, with the most important of these being the possibility of attaining an empathetic perception of the other and a sense of embodied risk. As these elements are essential features of the clinical encounter, the aim of this paper is to determine whether teleconsultation exhibits these features. To do that, I will integrate phenomenological philosophy with qualitative research drawing materials from both the philosophical tradition, particularly with respect to the concepts of the face-to-face encounter and embodied risk (A. Schutz and H. Dreyfus), and qualitative research study regarding patient experiences of teleconsultation. I will argue that teleconsultation does involve both the possibility of perceiving the other empathetically and the possibility of experiencing a sense of embodied risk. (shrink)

The global crisis of COVID-19 pandemic has considerably accelerated the use of teleconsultation (consultation between the patient and the doctor via video platforms). While it has some obvious benefits and drawbacks for both the patient and the doctor, it is important to consider—how teleconsultation impacts the quality of the patient-doctor relationship? I will approach this question through the lens of phenomenology of the body, focusing on the question—what happens to the patient objectification in teleconsultation? To answer this question I will (...) adopt a phenomenological approach combining both insights drawn from the phenomenological tradition, i.e., the concepts of the lived body and the object body, and the results from the phenomenologically informed qualitative research study on the patient experience of teleconsultation. The theoretical background against which I have developed this study comprises discussions within the field of phenomenology of medicine regarding the different sources of patient objectification within clinical encounter and the arguments concerning the negative impact that objectification has on the quality of care. I will argue that a factor that has frequently been identified within phenomenology of medicine as the main source of patient objectification in clinical encounters, namely, the internalized gaze of the clinician, is diminished during teleconsultation, increasing patient’s sense of agency, decreasing her sense of alienation and opening up the possibility for a closer relationship between the patient and the health care provider, all of which lead to the transformation of the hierarchical patient-health care professional relationship. (shrink)

Stresses on healthcare systems and moral distress among clinicians are urgent, intertwined bioethical problems in contemporary healthcare. Yet conceptualizations of moral distress in bioethical inquiry often overlook a range of routine threats to professional integrity in healthcare work. Using examples from our research on frontline physicians working during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article clarifies conceptual distinctions between moral distress, moral injury, and moral stress and illustrates how these concepts operate together in healthcare work. Drawing from the philosophy of healthcare, we (...) explain how moral stress results from the normal operations of overstressed systems; unlike moral distress and moral injury, it may not involve a sense of powerlessness concerning patient care. The analysis of moral stress directs attention beyond the individual, to stress-generating systemic factors. We conclude by reflecting on how and why this conceptual clarity matters for improving clinicians’ professional wellbeing, and offer preliminary pathways for intervention. (shrink)

Argument-mapping software abounds, and one of the reasons is that using the software has been shown to teach/promote/improve critical thinking skills. These positive results are very encouraging, but they also raise the question of whether the computer tutorial environment is producing these results, or whether learning argument mapping, even with just paper and pencil, is sufficient. Based on the results of two empirical studies, I argue that the basic skill of being able to represent an argument diagrammatically plays an important (...) role in the improvement of critical-thinking skills. While these studies do not offer a direct comparison between the two methods, it is important for anyone wishing to employ argument mapping in the classroom to know that significant results can be obtained even with the most rudimentary of tools. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Solidarity’ is a key concept in political movements and usually bears on matters of labour, health and social justice. As such, it is essential in the reproduction and transformation of communities that support their members and protect their interests. It is sometimes overlooked that interspecies solidarity already pertains with a number of domesticated animals, and that people are willing to carry substantial emotional, financial and social burdens to benefit them. There has been even more reluctance to acknowledge wild animals as (...) fellow members of our political communities with whom we might stand in solidarity. The purpose of this paper is to propose that solidaristic relations with certain wild animals are not only possible, but also already exist in some contexts. It explores three different understandings of solidarity, and in probing to what extent they can be applied to wild animals, it identifies some important different roles they can play in ‘animal politics’, and shows how they can help us reconceive our communities in less anthropocentric terms. (shrink)

A key topic within the field of the phenomenology of medicine has been the relationship between body and self in illness, including discussions about the otherness and mineness of the body. The aim of this article is to distinguish between different meanings of bodily otherness and mineness in illness with reference to the interpretation of the body as “saturated phenomenon,” inspired by the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion. With the help of Marion’s ideas it is possible to distinguish between two meanings (...) of bodily otherness and of mineness (objective and non-objective forms). These distinctions support and elaborate on ideas already found in the phenomenology of medicine and offer further insights into the nature of the experience of illness. (shrink)

Supercommentary on Siddhāntabindu of Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, exegesis of Daśaślokī, treatise of the Advaita school in Indic philosophy, by Śaṅkarācārya.

In contrast to political realism's equation of the `political' with domination, Hannah Arendt understood the `political' as a relation of friendship utterly opposed to the use of violence. This article offers a critique of that understanding. It becomes clear that Arendt's challenge to realism, as exemplified by Max Weber, succeeds on account of a dubious redefinition of the `political' that is the reverse image of the one-sided vision of politics she had hoped to contest. Questioning this paradoxical turn leads to (...) a critique of Arendt's separation of violence and power and, consequently, her attempt to insulate a politics of friendship from one of hostility and coercion. However, political realism is not thereby affirmed. What is required, instead, is a view of the `political' that accepts the interwoven-ness of violence and power but also emphasizes the normative ideals of moderation and care. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • enmity • friendship • moderation • the `political' • power • realism • violence • Max Weber. (shrink)

While feelings of disgust and repulsion are experienced and accepted as part of care practices of nurses who work in palliative care, they are often silenced. Working alongside two palliative care nurses in a hospice setting, we engaged in a narrative inquiry to inquire into their experiences of disgust. The study took place in a palliative care setting in a large urban city in Germany. We understand care practices as actions that follow a logic of care. According to a logic (...) of care, actions are situated within a social context, given by specific relationships including power, and individual needs. Various aspects of disgust are visible in the experiences of the participants and highlighted in the narrative threads of disgust and silence, disgust and protection, and disgust and boundaries. Embedded in the experience of disgust of nurses working in palliative care, we see that there are borderlands of care that challenge who we are and are becoming. Opening discussion about disgust in nursing makes visible the complexity of care. (shrink)

“It's almost like putting salt in a wound, for this person who's already made a very difficult decision,” suggested Meghan Patterson, a licensed obstetrician-gynecologist whom we interviewed in our qualitative study of the experiences of North Carolina abortion providers practicing under the state's Woman's Right to Know Act. The act requires that women receive counseling with state-mandated information at least twenty-four hours prior to obtaining an abortion. After the law was passed, Patterson worked with clinic administrators, in consultation with a (...) lawyer, to write a script to be used in the state-mandated counseling procedure. She and her colleagues took particular steps to mitigate the effects of what she described as HB 854's “forced language”—such as referring to the “father of the child.” While HB 854 stipulated that patients must be informed of the medical risks associated with the particular abortion procedure as well as those of carrying the child to term, Patterson's script made explicit the magnitude of comparative risks, emphasizing that the risks of carrying a pregnancy to term are substantially greater than the risks of an early-term abortion. She felt that these contextualization strategies helped to facilitate trust and rapport in a clinical care situation that proved relationally and morally challenging. In this article, we take up and expand on this point by elucidating an empirically grounded approach to ethically justified care when health care providers face legal or institutional policy mandates that raise possible moral conflicts. Our approach builds on recent bioethics discourse addressing conscience in the practice of medicine. While the concept of conscience has broad philosophical underpinnings relating to moral judgment, agency, and discernments of right and wrong, debates in bioethics have tended to engage the concept primarily vis-à-vis rights of conscientious objection or refusal. Here, we suggest a broader frame for thinking about claims of conscience in health care. Our approach draws on the feminist bioethics and the ethics of care literatures to highlight how providers may be motivated by matters of conscience, including relational concerns, in the active provision of certain forms of care. What emerges are two possibilities: not only conscientious refusal to comply with a policy mandate but also conscientious compliance—working conscientiously within a mandate's confines. (shrink)

Using a simulated two-party negotiation, we examined how trustworthiness and power balance affected deception. In order to trigger deception, we used an issue that had no value for one of the two parties. We found that high cognitive trust increased deception whereas high affective trust decreased deception. Negotiators who expressed anxiety also used more deception whereas those who expressed optimism also used less deception. The nature of the negotiating relationship (mutuality and level of dependence) interacted with trust and negotiators’ affect (...) to influence levels of deception. Deception was most likely to occur when negotiators reported low trust or expressed negative emotions in the context of nonmutual or low dependence relationships. In these relationships, emotions that signaled certainty were associated with misrepresentation whereas emotions that signaled uncertainty were associated with concealment of information. Negotiators who expressed positive emotions in the context of a nonmutual or high dependence relationship also used less deception. Our results are consistent with a fair trade model in which negotiator increases deception when contextual and interpersonal cues heighten concerns about exploitation and decrease deception when these cues attenuate concerns about exploitation. (shrink)

A pattern of research findings indicates that excessive devotion to a favorite celebrity is linked to attitudes and behaviors that are psychologically unhealthy and may predict low life satisfaction. This study examines whether four common measures of life satisfaction predict admiration for celebrities in two university samples and one community sample of young adults. Our results showed significant correlations between celebrity admiration and two measures of life satisfaction. We also found that the predictors of life satisfaction correlate with each other (...) in ways that are consistent with previous research in positive psychology. Our research suggests an inverse relationship between celebrity admiration and life satisfaction. In addition, the results contribute to establishing the validity of four contemporary life satisfaction measures. (shrink)

Background Bioethical debates about privacy, big data, and public health surveillance have not sufficiently engaged the perspectives of those being surveilled. The data justice framework suggests that big data applications have the potential to create disproportionate harm for socially marginalized groups. Using examples from our research on HIV surveillance for individuals incarcerated in jails, we analyze ethical issues in deploying big data in public health surveillance. -/- Methods We conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 24 people living with HIV who had (...) been previously incarcerated in county jails about their perspectives on and experiences with HIV surveillance, as part of a larger study to characterize ethical considerations in leveraging big data techniques to enhance continuity of care for incarcerated people living with HIV. -/- Results Most participants expressed support for the state health department tracking HIV testing results and viral load data. Several viewed HIV surveillance as a violation of privacy, and several had actively avoided contact from state public health outreach workers. Participants were most likely to express reservations about surveillance when they viewed the state’s motives as self-interested. Perspectives highlight the mistrust that structurally vulnerable people may have in the state’s capacity to act as an agent of welfare. Findings suggest that adopting a nuanced, context-sensitive view on surveillance is essential. -/- Conclusions Establishing trustworthiness through interpersonal interactions with public health personnel is important to reversing historical legacies of harm to racial minorities and structurally vulnerable groups. Empowering stakeholders to participate in the design and implementation of data infrastructure and governance is critical for advancing a data justice agenda, and can offset privacy concerns. The next steps in advancing the data justice framework in public health surveillance will be to innovate ways to represent the voices of structurally vulnerable groups in the design and governance of big data initiatives. (shrink)

An intellectual history of the philosophers who grappled with the problem of evil, and the case for why pessimism still holds moral value for us today In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers engaged in heated debates on the question of how God could have allowed evil and suffering in a creation that is supposedly good. Dark Matters traces how the competing philosophical traditions of optimism and pessimism arose from early modern debates about the problem of evil, and makes a (...) compelling case for the rediscovery of pessimism as a source for compassion, consolation, and perhaps even hope. Bringing to life one of the most vibrant eras in the history of philosophy, Mara van der Lugt discusses legendary figures such as Leibniz, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Schopenhauer. She also introduces readers to less familiar names, such as Bayle, King, La Mettrie, and Maupertuis. Van der Lugt describes not only how the earliest optimists and pessimists were deeply concerned with finding an answer to the question of the value of existence that does justice to the reality of human suffering, but also how they were fundamentally divided over what such an answer should look like. A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today's leading scholars, Dark Matters reveals how the crucial moral aim of pessimism is to find a way of speaking about suffering that offers consolation and does justice to the fragility of life. (shrink)

The word “philosophy” comes from the Greek “philos” (meaning love) and “sophia” (meaning wisdom); thus philosophy literally is the “love of wisdom.” Whatever else philosophy may be, most people agree that it still retains this spirit of its etymological roots, and that when we are engaged in philosophy we are pursuing wisdom for the sake of itself. Wisdom, however, is not the same thing as knowledge or information. We aren’t merely trying to amass list of interesting ideas, or believe anything (...) that sounds good. Wisdom is, at least in part, the reflection on and critical evaluation of what we ourselves and others around us believe about some very heady topics. (shrink)

During the last few decades, many thinkers have advocated for the importance of the phenomenological approach in developing the understanding of the lived experience of illness. In their attempts, they have referred to ideas found in the history of phenomenology, most notably, in the works of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. The aim of this paper is to sketch out an interpretation of illness based on a yet unexplored conceptual framework of the phenomenology of French thinker (...) Jean-Luc Marion. Focusing on concepts of the saturated phenomenon and flesh, the paper develops an interpretation of illness as the saturated phenomenon, which highlights a variety of dimensions of illness already elaborated within the phenomenology of medicine, such as the affective dimension of illness, the disruptive dimension of illness, the transformed perception of the self in illness, mineness of flesh in illness and the inexpressible and hermeneutical dimension of illness. In addition to that, the paper explores some of the consequences the proposed interpretation of illness offers regarding the nature of illness and health. It is argued that illness in its essence is very similar to the experience of other saturated phenomena, suggesting that the difference between them does not lie within the character of the affective givenness, but rather within the dynamic relationship between the affective givenness and its conceptualization. It is also shown that the experience of health is compatible with the experience of saturation and thus is not limited to the tacit and harmonious background state. (shrink)

Today, in both theory and practice, the concepts of corporate social responsibility and ethics are not necessarily related. Organizations can demonstrate high levels of social proactivity in their CSR policies with or without having laudable levels of ethical quality or virtuousness. This article introduces the concepts of organizational ethical quality to evaluate the moral excellence of CSR actions and policies, identifying and categorizing varying levels ranging from the absence of ethical virtuousness, termed immoral CSR, to high levels of moral CSR, (...) or ethical virtuousness. High MCSR is the product of both high levels of OEQ in conjunction with more proactive CSR policies based on social action. (shrink)

Problem-Based Learning has become an increasingly popular instructional method for a variety of disciplines at all levels. Many studies and meta-analyses of these studies have shown the efficacy of this method for developing knowledge and skills. I adopted this method for teaching Engineering Ethics at Carnegie Mellon University, which has as its main course objectives the development of moral reasoning skills, as well as collaboration and communication skills, with special attention given to ethical dilemmas that may arise in the normal (...) course of an engineer’s professional career. In the most recent iteration of the course, I used the Engineering and Science Issues Test as a pretest and posttest to test the development of my students’ moral reasoning skills over the course of the semester. Based on the results of these tests, I argue that the students in my Engineering Ethics course did in fact significantly develop their moral reasoning skills. (shrink)

On 19 July 2016, three medical organisations filed a federal lawsuit against representatives from several Vermont agencies over the Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act. The law is similar to aid-in-dying laws in four other US states, but the lawsuit hinges on a distinctive aspect of Vermont's law pertaining to patients' rights to information. The lawsuit raises questions about whether, and under what circumstances, there is an ethical obligation to inform terminally ill patients about AID as an (...) end-of-life option. Much of the literature on clinical communication about AID addresses how physicians should respond to patient requests for assisted dying, but neglects the question of how physicians should approach patients who may not know enough about AID to request it. In this article, I examine the possibility of an affirmative duty to inform terminally ill patients about AID in light of ethical concerns about professional responsibilities to patients and the maintenance of the patient–provider relationship. I suggest that we should not take for granted that communication about AID ought to be patient-initiated, and that there may be circumstances in which physicians have good reasons to introduce the topic themselves. By identifying ethical considerations that ought to inform such discussions, I aim to set an agenda for future bioethical research that adopts a broader perspective on clinical communication about AID. (shrink)

In this paper, classical pragmatism is used as a method, not as a substantial ethical theory, to develop “moral pragmatics.” Moral pragmatics offers a constructive approach for making progress where traditional ethical theories converge, and it innovates ethical deliberation. Assuming widespread agreement that real moral problems need practical solutions, the paper addresses two related problems: the missing link between ethical theories and moral practice, and the question of who is in charge of finding such solutions. It argues that “conscience” can (...) create a link between ethical knowledge and moral practice, and that this partly discharges “the ethicist” from the task of solving problems that are not really, or not only, hers. Two specific methodological innovations are suggested that go beyond admonitions to render ethics sensitive to context. Instead, a reevaluation of “casuistry” and a sensitivity for “finding the right words” give an idea of how to achieve this goal. (shrink)

This essay looks closely at metaphors and other figures of speech that often feature in how Americans talk about dementia, becoming part of cultural narratives: shared stories that convey ideas and values, and also worries and fears. It uses approaches from literary studies to analyze how cultural narratives about dementia may surface in conversations with family members or health care professionals. This essay also draws on research on a notable social effect of legalizing medical aid in dying: patients may find (...) it easier to bring up a range of concerns, regardless of whether they have any interest in hastening their own death. The essay proposes that health care professionals rethink an idea prominent within their own culture: that conversations about the end of a person's life are inherently difficult. This framing may make it hard for people facing dementia to bring up their concerns about what lies ahead. We suggest a different way to think about these conversations, using the metaphor of “opening the door” to represent inviting a patient to bring up issues of deepest concern. (shrink)

Ecrivain méconnu en France, Cioran a un parcours original tant sur le plan de son histoire que de ses idées. Ce livre retrace le cheminement intellectuel de cet écrivain hors du commun. La jeunesse du philosophe dans une Roumanie de l'entre-deux-guerres abrutie par le délire politique est d'abord abordée. L'idéologie de la génération de Cioran est ensuite présentée, ses liens avec Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionesco, Constantin Noica.

Relato e balanço da aplicação da Pedagogia Histórico-Crítica no Colégio Estadual Cristo Rei – Ensino Normal como política pública do Estado do Paraná, analisando-se as gestões de governo consideradas progressistas, até a atual gestão. Percebe-se que a referida Pedagogia não se efetivou totalmente.

Since its outbreak, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated discourses and practices that directly refer to the semantic universe usually connected to disability and illness. Words such as ‘pre-existing conditions’, ‘risk groups’, ‘accessibility’, and ‘vulnerability’ have become everyday elements of official and informal communications across the globe. In this article, I explore the contradictions that arise from such uses through the lens of crip studies. In the first part, I observe how the idea of vulnerability became mainstream, moving from being usually (...) attached to disability and illness to being depicted as a universal condition. Such a shift serves the double purpose of reinstating the predominance of able-bodiedness as the preferable normalcy and invisibilising the particular conditions of disabled and chronically ill people in the pandemic. In the second part, I discuss the perverse use of the expressions ‘risk group’ and ‘underlying conditions’ as biopolitical tools to reinforce already existing forms of oppression. The third part comprises a reflection on accessibility and the sudden advent of working-from-home. Finally, I reflect on confinement and interdependence as key concepts to draft a politics of transformation that moves from disability and chronic illness to include all experiences of intersectional oppression. As other markers of oppression, illness and disability can determine the possibilities of survival through the crisis, not only because they are linked to bodily fragility but also because of the systemic violence they are immersed in. The knowledge produced from a place of vulnerability can hence show interesting elements to better understand the challenges of this pandemic through an intersectional perspective. (shrink)

Social context shapes negotiators’ actions, including their willingness to act unethically. We use a simulated negotiation to test how three dimensions of social context—dyadic gender composition, negotiation strategy, and trust—interact to influence one micro-ethical decision, the use of deception. Deception in all-male dyads was relatively unaffected by trust or the other negotiator’s strategy. In mixed-sex dyads, negotiators consistently increased their use of deception when three forms of trust were low and opponents used an accommodating strategy. However, in all-female dyads, negotiators (...) appeared to use multiple and shifting reference points in deciding when to deceive the other party. In these dyads, the use of deception increased when a competitive strategy combined with low benevolence-based trust or an accommodating strategy combined with high identity-based trust. Deception in all-female dyads decreased when a competitive strategy was used in the context of low deterrence-based trust. (shrink)

Bioethical concerns about the potential for abuse in medical aid in dying (MAID) have focused primarily on the risk of coercion (Battin et al. 2007; Foley and Hendin 2002). Accordingly, the require...

Stichter’s The Skillfulness of Virtue provides an original and contemporary discussion of virtue-acquisition from an interdisciplinary standpoint. By equating virtues to skills, he offers an empirically informed progression towards virtue expertise. With the focus on gaining proficiency, there is little room to analyse the status of the virtue-novice, who is equated to a novice in any other skill: an agent consciously following simple rules, gaining experience in order to respond to normatively-laden situations with more automaticity in the following stages of (...) skill-acquisition. This paper argues for a disanalogy between the virtue novice and novices in other skills, resulting from the understanding that follows from learning virtue words such as ‘kindness’ and ‘honesty’. Our brains are structured to find and subsequently use patterns to skilfully move around in our environment. These patterns can be represented in what Stichter calls ‘schemas’ or mental models of categorisations. Virtue words refer to patterns that would be difficult to categorise without linguistic labels, as instances of these categories are highly divergent. Virtue words are thus learned through examples of virtuous behaviour. Moreover, as virtue words are thick ethical concepts, they contain a normative load. I argue that due to these characteristics, novices who use virtue vocabulary are in a more advanced position than novices in other skills. So, a kindness novice who understands the word ‘kind’ has a better idea of how to act kindly than the chess novice has an idea of how to play chess by understanding the word ‘chess’. (shrink)

Rosenzweig's Bible examines the high stakes, both theological and political, of Franz Rosenzweig's attempt to revivify the Hebrew Bible and use it as the basis for a Jewish textual identity. Mara Benjamin's innovative reading of The Star of Redemption places Rosenzweig's best-known work at the beginning of an intellectual trajectory that culminated in a monumental translation of the Bible, thus overturning fundamental assumptions that have long guided the appraisal of this titan of modern Jewish thought. She argues that Rosenzweig's (...) response to modernity was paradoxical: he challenged his readers to encounter the biblical text as revelation, reinventing scripture – both the Bible itself and the very notion of a scriptural text – in order to invigorate Jewish intellectual and social life, but did so in a distinctly modern key, ultimately reinforcing the foundations of German-Jewish post-Enlightenment liberal thought. Rosenzweig's Bible illuminates the complex interactions that arise when modern readers engage the sacred texts of ancient religious traditions. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have looked to empirical findings about psychopaths to help determine whether moral agency is underwritten by reason, or by some affective capacity, such as empathy. Since one of psychopaths’ most glaring deficits is a lack of empathy, and they are widely considered to be amoral, psychopaths are often taken as a test case for the hypothesis that empathy is necessary for moral agency. However, people with autism also lack empathy, so it is reasonable to think that (...) any empirically-informed attempt to answer the question of whether empathy is necessary for moral agency should give due attention to autism as well as psychopathy. Jeanette Kennett’s thought-provoking paper ‘Autism, Empathy and Moral Agency’ (2002) is an early and arguably the most notable example of such an attempt. Kennett argues that although autistic people and psychopaths both lack empathy, autistic people possess a ‘reverence for reason’ that enables them to become capable moral agents. By contrast, psychopaths lack this rational capacity, and it is this defect of reason rather than an empathic impairment that explains why they are amoral. Kennett thus concludes that empathy is not necessary for moral agency. In this chapter, I challenge Kennett’s argument. First, I review the empirical evidence in order to demonstrate that there is a component of empathy called affective empathy that is impaired in psychopaths but largely preserved in autistics. As such, the claim that psychopaths and autistics share a common lack of empathy is unjustified. Second, I challenge Kennett’s claim that empathy plays no role in explaining the moral difference between psychopaths and autistics. Instead, I contend that the intact affective empathy of autistic people is a crucial component of their capacity to act from reverence for reason. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper analyzes the complex and many-layered interrelation between the realization of the inevitable limits of precision in the experimental domain, the emerging quantum theory, and empirically oriented philosophy in the years 1925–1935. In contrast to the usual historical presentation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as a purely theoretical achievement, this work discloses the experimental roots of Heisenberg's contribution. In addition, this paper argues that the positivistic philosophy of elimination of unobservables was not used as a guiding principle in the (...) emergence of the new quantum theory, but rather mostly as a post facto justification. The case of P. W. Bridgman, analyzed in this paper, demonstrates how inconclusive operationalistic arguments are, when used as a possible heuristic aid for future discoveries. A large part of this paper is devoted to the evolution of Bridgman's views, and his skeptical reassessment of operationalism and of the very notion of scientific truth. (shrink)

Knowing Nature brings together political ecologists and science studies scholars to showcase the key points of encounter between the two fields and how this ...