This exploratory study investigates the divergent ways that people make sense of their own charisma. Through in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with people who self-identified as charismatic (_n_ = 11), findings reveal that self-identified charismatic people hold divergent views regarding (1) who they believe benefits from their charisma (self or others), (2) how they believe they came to be charismatic (developed or innate), (3) how they experience self-confidence (self-conscious or self-assured), and (4) how they manage rejection (preparation or resilience). Taken together, (...) these divergent views reflect at least two charisma profiles—what we term _opportunistic charisma_ (i.e., charisma employed for personal gain) and _humanistic charisma_ (i.e., charisma employed to empower others)—with implications for humanistic management theory and practice. (shrink)

Lack of guidance and regulation for authorizing medical cannabis for conditions involving the health and neurodevelopment of children is ethically problematic as it promulgates access inequities, risk-benefit inconsistencies, and inadequate consent mechanisms. In two virtual sessions using participatory action research and consensus-building methods, we obtained perspectives of stakeholders on ethics and medical cannabis for children and youth. The sessions focused on the scientific and regulatory landscape of medical cannabis, surrogate decision-making and assent, and the social and political culture of medical (...) cannabis. We found that evidence-gathering and data dissemination, pressures on clinical relationships, and the lack of integration of culturally diverse perspectives and Indigenous knowledges were key areas of concern. Participants emphasized the importance of utilizing adaptive study designs, highlighted the importance of trust-building between clinicians, patients and caregivers, and discussed barriers including historical and ongoing stigmatization of medical cannabis. We conclude that continued public consultation and strength-based research that integrate diverse perspectives are critical steps forward. (shrink)

Effective documentation is considered a core competency for clinical ethics consultation. Ethics consultants within the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, observed variation in the formatting of ethics chart notes across consultants and realized that this formatting was based on their own views of effectiveness. To minimize variation and optimize the readability and understandability of ethics chart notes for end users, a team undertook a quality improvement project to assess the formatting preferences of healthcare professionals who rely on ethics consultation notes. (...) The team developed three sample templates and conducted interviews with stakeholders to understand their preferences. A single standardized template was developed based on the preferences that emerged, which all consultants on the ethics consultation service then utilized. In the first five months of implementation, the percentage of end user respondents marking the highest Likert scale option on a post-consultation survey regarding whether the ethics consultation service provided helpful documentation increased from 60 percent to 72 percent compared to the same five-month period in the year prior. (shrink)

For healing the land and human relationships to land are a step toward healing a troubled relationship, borne of a history, which is painful for native people and shameful for settlers. Protection...

This article surveys recent developments in the epistemology of modality.

The COVID-19 pandemic put a large burden on many healthcare systems, causing fears about resource scarcity and triage. Several COVID-19 guidelines included age as an explicit factor and practices of both triage and ‘anticipatory triage’ likely limited access to hospital care for elderly patients, especially those in care homes. To ensure the legitimacy of triage guidelines, which affect the public, it is important to engage the public’s moral intuitions. Our study aimed to explore general public views in the UK on (...) the role of age, and related factors like frailty and quality of life, in triage during the COVID-19 pandemic. We held online deliberative workshops with members of the general public. Participants were guided through a deliberative process to maximise eliciting informed and considered preferences. Participants generally accepted the need for triage but strongly rejected ‘fair innings’ and ‘life projects’ principles as justifications for age-based allocation. They were also wary of the ‘maximise life-years’ principle, preferring to maximise the number of lives rather than life years saved. Although they did not arrive at a unified recommendation of one principle, a concern for three core principles and values eventually emerged: equality, efficiency and vulnerability. While these remain difficult to fully respect at once, they captured a considered, multifaceted consensus: utilitarian considerations of efficiency should be tempered with a concern for equality and vulnerability. This ‘triad’ of ethical principles may be a useful structure to guide ethical deliberation as societies negotiate the conflicting ethical demands of triage. (shrink)

The early nineteenth century was a time between empires in German-speaking lands, following the collapse of the holy Roman empire in 1806. This was also the time at which modern concepts of nations, nationalism, and the state entered theological discourse, bound together with emerging notions of world historical progress. From this time until the First World War, the task of conceptualizing national identity and the nature of the ‘Christian state’ became a pressing theological problem. This essay seeks to locate Schleiermacher’s (...) reflections on the Christian state within this developing problematic. Schleiermacher’s philosophical and theological works closely engaged emerging ideas of the nation, state, and historical progress. However, he departed from the more totalizing affirmations of national spirit and the Christian state of many of his contemporaries, arguing for a more limited conception of the state as a point of transition in the ongoing historical development of the reign of God. (shrink)

Many consumers fail to identify online sponsored content as advertising. This is an ethical problem because consumers need to know when they are exposed to advertising so they can raise counterargu...

The idea that the epistemology of modality is in some sense a priori is a popular one, but it has turned out to be difficult to precisify in a way that does not expose it to decisive counterexamples. The most common precisifications follow Kripke’s suggestion that cases of necessary a posteriori truth that can be known a priori to be necessary if true ‘may give a clue to a general characterization of a posteriori knowledge of necessary truths’. The idea is (...) that whether it is contingent whether p can be known a priori for at least some broad range of sentences ‘p’. Recently, Al Casullo and Jens Kipper have discussed restrictions of such principles to atomic sentences. We show that decisive counterexamples even to such dramatically restricted Kripke-style principles can be constructed using minimal logical resources. We then consider further restrictions, and show that the counterexamples to the original principles can be turned into counterexamples to the further restricted principles. We conclude that, if there are any true restrictions of Kripke-style principles, then they are so weak as to be of little epistemological interest. (shrink)

Challenges to the exercise of the basic socio-economic rights of half the global population give rise to some of the most pressing issues today. This timely book focuses on world poverty, providing a systematic exposition of the evolving legal responsibility of the international community of states to cooperate in addressing the structural obstacles that contribute to this injustice. This book analyzes the approach, contribution, and current limitations of the international law of human rights to the manifestations of world poverty, inviting (...) the reader to rethink human rights, and, in particular, the framing of responsibilities that are essential to their contemporary protection. (shrink)

Thought experiments provide a conspicuous case study for epistemologists of the imagination. Galileo’s famous thought experiment about falling stones is a central example in the debate about how thought experiments in science work. According to a standard interpretation, the thought experiment poses a challenge to an Aristotelian principle about falling bodies that conceives of bodies in an extremely liberal way. This chapter argues that this interpretation is implausible and then shows how the thought experiment might present a challenge to a (...) principle that conceives of bodies in a less permissive, more plausible way. The new interpretation of the thought experiment relies on a distinction between two ways of imagining Galileo’s experiment, one of which requires Aristotelians to temporarily ignore their belief in the principle under challenge. It is suggested that the distinction tracks an increasingly familiar distinction among dual-process theories in psychology: ‘intuitive’ and ‘reflective’ imagination. In order for Aristotelians to appreciate the thought experiment’s challenge to their theory, they are expected to use their intuitive imagination and not just their reflective imagination. (shrink)

Due to huge advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, chatbots are gaining significance in the field of customer service. For users, it may be hard to distinguish whether they are communicating with a human or a chatbot. This brings ethical issues, as users have the right to know who or what they are interacting with (European Commission in Regulatory framework proposal on artificial intelligence. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai, 2022). One of the solutions is to include a disclosure at the start (...) of the interaction (e.g., “this is a chatbot”). However, companies are reluctant to use disclosures, as consumers may perceive artificial agents as less knowledgeable and empathetic than their human counterparts (Luo et al. in Market Sci 38(6):937–947, 2019). The current mixed methods study, combining qualitative interviews (n = 8) and a quantitative experiment (n = 194), delves into users’ responses to a disclosed vs. undisclosed customer service chatbot, focusing on source orientation, anthropomorphism, and social presence. The qualitative interviews reveal that it is the willingness to help the customer and the friendly tone of voice that matters to the users, regardless of the artificial status of the customer care representative. The experiment did not show significant effects of the disclosure (vs. non-disclosure). Implications for research, legislators and businesses are discussed. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that sense perception cannot deliver knowledge of nonactual (metaphysical) possibilities. We are not supposed to be able to know that a proposition p is necessary or that p is possible (if p is false) by sense perception. This paper aims to establish that the role of sense perception is not so limited. It argues that we can know lots of modal facts by perception. While the most straightforward examples concern possibility and contingency, others concern necessity and (...) impossibility. The possibility of a perceptual route to some modal knowledge is not as radical as it may at first sound. On the contrary, acknowledging it has benefits. (shrink)

Developing a simple test to identify swiftly neonates with sepsis who carry the genetic variant which means that one dose of the recommended antibiotic, gentamicin, will cause the child to become profoundly deaf looks like an admirable objective. The baby needs antibiotics and needs them within 1 hour of admission to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Conventional genetic tests take much longer to yield results. The test being trialled produces results in 25 min; a baby who carries the variant (...) can be treated with a different antibiotic. All the test requires is a gentle swab of the baby’s inner cheek. Babies can be treated for potentially fatal sepsis without the risk that the drugs designed to save their lives will cost them their hearing. Parents and healthcare staff are relieved of worry—a great idea? PALOH is not a trial of the safety or efficacy of the test, only to assess how feasible it will be to carry out this test in a busy NICU, without disrupting the care of the baby. A tiny painless ‘scrape’ will take a sample of DNA—what’s the fuss about? Several other invasive and painful procedures will be carried out without a fuss.1 The problem is DNA. Genetic information must be safeguarded from falling into the wrong hands. In section 45 of Human Tissue Act 2004 (HTA), Parliament legislated to prohibit non-consensual DNA testing.1 It fits uncomfortably in a statute designed to regulate retention and uses of human material, after revelations that organs and tissue from the …. (shrink)

La aversión de los renacentistas por el método silogístico les hizo experimentarnuevas formas literarias más “estéticas” que sirvieron a menudo paraencubrir la falta de cualquier especie de lógica o de razonamiento. El usodel método geométrico sería la respuesta de los filósofos del siglo XVII aesta falta de lógica y de razonamiento. Tal parece ser, en efecto, el caso deDescartes quien borró “la lengua de la Escuela y el estilo de la Escuela” ydecretó la universalidad del método matemático. Con todo, según (...) Spinoza,Descartes ni logró sustraerse a la férula escolástica, ya que heredó de lasespeculaciones teológicas medievales, ni alcanzó liberarse del todo delórganon aristotélico. (shrink)

The epistemology of modality has focused on metaphysical modality and, more recently, counterfactual conditionals. Knowledge of kinds of modality that are not metaphysical has so far gone largely unexplored. Yet other theoretically interesting kinds of modality, such as nomic, practical, and ‘easy’ possibility, are no less puzzling epistemologically. Could Clinton easily have won the 2016 presidential election—was it an easy possibility? Given that she didn’t in fact win the election, how, if at all, can we know whether she easily could (...) have? This paper investigates the epistemology of the broad category of ‘objective’ modality, of which metaphysical modality is a special, limiting case. It argues that the same cognitive mechanisms that are capable of producing knowledge of metaphysical modality are also capable of producing knowledge of all other objective modalities. This conclusion can be used to explain the roles of counterfactual reasoning and the imagination in the epistemology of objective modality. (shrink)

While valuable work has been done addressing clinical ethics within established healthcare systems, we anticipate that the projected growth in acquisitions of community hospitals and facilities by large tertiary hospitals will impact the field of clinical ethics and the day-to-day responsibilities of clinical ethicists in ways that have yet to be explored. Toward the goal of providing clinical ethicists guidance on a range of issues that they may encounter in the systematization process, we discuss key considerations and potential challenges in (...) implementing system-wide ethics consultation services. Specifically, we identify four models for organizing, developing, and enhancing ethics consultation activities within a system created through acquisitions: train-the-trainer, local capacity-building, circuit-riding, and consolidated accountability. We note each model’s benefits and challenges. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to consider the broader landscape of issues affected by consolidation. We anticipate that clinical ethicists, volunteer consultants, and hospital administrators will benefit from our recommendations. (shrink)

Over the past decade, we have witnessed some early signs of progress in the battle against international bribery and corruption, a problem that throughout the history of commerce had previously been ignored. We present a model that we then use to assess progress in reducing bribery. The model components include both hard law and soft law legislation components and enforcement and compliance components. We begin by summarizing the literature that convincingly argues that bribery is an immoral and unethical practice and (...) that the economic harm it causes falls most heavily on those least able to absorb it. The next section summarizes the main provisions of anti-bribery legislation including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the Organization for Eco nomic Development's Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Officials in International Business Transactions, the United Nations Convention Against Corruption and the laws of selected countries. We conclude this section with a discussion of the "moral imperialism" argument for not imposing Western laws and values on other cultures. The next section focuses on the roles played by NGOs including Transparency International (TI), the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the International Chamber of Commerce. We review trends in enforcement and prosecution, including a review of the United States' enforcement processes, mechanisms for cross-border legal assistance, a discussion of the distinctive nature of FCPA cases, and an assessment of what the future holds for enforcement. The final section focuses on compliance processes for corporations aimed at reducing the risk of FCPA and related violations. This section also addresses the ethics of gift giving and "grease" payments. The article concludes with a summary and suggestions for further research. Throughout the article, we reference important bribery cases and include comments from several authorities who are on the front lines of the battle against international bribery. (shrink)

Debates regarding clinical ethicists’ scope of practice are not novel and will continue to evolve. Rapid changes in healthcare delivery, outcomes, and expectations have necessitated flexibility in clinical ethicists’ roles whereby hospital-based clinical ethicists are expected to be woven into the institutional fabric in a way that did not exist in more traditional relationships. In this article we discuss three emerging roles: the ethicist embedded in the interdisciplinary team, the ethicist with an expanded educational mandate, and the ethicist as a (...) therapeutic presence in the patient care space. Such expanded capacities offer more robust, positive contributions to institutional culture, stakeholders’ relationships, and patient-centered care. (shrink)

This is a new release of the original 1948 edition.

This paper examines "moderate modal skepticism", a form of skepticism about metaphysical modality defended by Peter van Inwagen in order to blunt the force of certain modal arguments in the philosophy of religion. Van Inwagen’s argument for moderate modal skepticism assumes Yablo's (1993) influential world-based epistemology of possibility. We raise two problems for this epistemology of possibility, which undermine van Inwagen's argument. We then consider how one might motivate moderate modal skepticism by relying on a different epistemology of possibility, which (...) does not face these problems: Williamson’s (2007: ch. 5) counterfactual-based epistemology. Two ways of motivating moderate modal skepticism within that framework are found unpromising. Nevertheless, we also find a way of vindicating an epistemological thesis that, while weaker than moderate modal skepticism, is strong enough to support the methodological moral van Inwagen wishes to draw. (shrink)

Decisions related to births in the “gray zone” of periviability are particularly challenging. Despite published management guidelines, clinicians and families struggle to negotiate care management plans. Stakeholders must reconcile conflicting values in the context of evolving circumstances with a high degree of uncertainty within a short time period. Even skilled clinicians may struggle to guide the patient in making value–laden decisions without imposing their own values. Exploring the experiences of one pregnant woman and her caregivers, this case study highlights how (...) bias may undermine caregivers’ ability to meet their obligation to enhance patient autonomy and the moral distress they may experience when a patient’s values do not align with their own. Management strategies to mitigate the potential impact of bias and related moral distress are identified. The authors then describe one management strategy used in this case, facilitated ethics consultation, which is focused on thoughtful consideration of the patient’s perspective. (shrink)

Sider (2011, 2013) proposes a reductive analysis of metaphysical modality—‘(modal) Humeanism’—and goes on to argue that it has interesting epistemological and methodological implications. In particular, Humeanism is supposed to undermine a class of ‘arguments from possibility’, which includes Sider's (1993) own argument against mereological nihilism and Chalmers's (1996) argument against physicalism. I argue that Sider's arguments do not go through, and moreover that we should instead expect Humeanism to be compatible with the practice of arguing from possibility in philosophy.

Hay muchos retratos de Spinoza, pero ninguno de ellos está bien documentado, al menos suficientemente documentado como para satisfacer las exigencias del método iconográfico. Por falta de argumentos objetivos que permitan identificar a Spinoza entre tantos cuadros y grabados, tal vez podamos considerar que el “verdadero” retrato de Spinoza es el frontispicio de las Opera posthuma de 1677.

La trama de la novela El sueño de Bruno apunta a finales o clausuras en poten- cia, situaciones del pasado que no se han resuelto del todo y mantienen a los personajes en una especie de impasse o incapacidad de acción. Revisaremos una parte de la filosofía moral de Iris Murdoch en su texto “La idea de perfección”, segundo apartado de su texto La soberanía del bien, de 1970. Murdoch introduce los conceptos de atención, visión y perfección, para llevar a (...) cabo una crítica del análisis genético de los conceptos morales, que deja fuera la posibilidad de cambio: la posibilidad de ser capaces de prestar una atención más justa a lo que ocurre a nuestro alrededor y conseguir, entonces, transformar o modificar nues- tros conceptos y narrativas. La actividad moral humana consiste en el constante intento de perfeccionar dichas narrativas. (shrink)

This entry surveys recent developments in the epistemology of imagination, examining different views on the circumstances in which the imagination can function as a source of evidence, alongside more standard sources such as perception and inference.

Después de recordar las dificultades del pensamiento tomista cuando trata de la relación jerárquica entre dos facultades de Dios: la voluntad y el entendimiento y de precisar el intelectualismo tomista al mostrar que para Santo Tomás la voluntad divina tiene un límite, se vincula la discusión tomista con la obra de Descartes. Finalmente, se advierte que en Ockham y en su escuela nominalista se encuentra un antecedente de la posición cartesiana. La expresión "ne quidem ratione" remite a la doctrina de (...) Ockham y de su escuela sobre la simplicidad absoluta de la esencia divina. Pues tanto para Ockham como para Descartes "ni siquiera lógicamente (ne quidem ratione)" nos es posible asignar una distinción en las facultades divinas. Dios se hace incomprensible para nuestro pensamiento, para nuestra lógica. Y Él lo es, según Descartes y Ockham, porque su poder nos supera: la potentia Dei es absoluta. (shrink)

The influence of Phaedrus the fabulist on Martial the epigrammatist has long been neglected by scholarship. Quite recently scholars have started to pay more attention to Phaedrus’ literary techniques and allusive art, thus also paving the way for a reassessment of the role which Phaedrus played as a model for Martial. This paper examines the question to what extent the Flavian epigrammatist was inspired by Phaedrus’ literary techniques and argues that Phaedrus served as an important link in the process of (...) the reception of Neoteric and Augustan poetry. Although there are not many thematic parallels between Phaedrus and Martial, the later poet seems to have been inspired considerably by Phaedrus’ metapoetic techniques. Furthermore, the paper also investigates the epigrammatic potential of Phaedrus’ own poems, a potential which seems to have made the fabulist especially attractive as a model for Martial. (shrink)

La actitud que asume Descartes con respecto a la historia es inseparable del desmoronamiento del cosmos de Aristóteles y Santo Tomás a fines del siglo XIII, y del profundo sentimiento de soledad que sobrecoge al hombre. Lejos de reflejar la fuerza de un pensamiento seguro del poder de su pensar, la modernidad de Descartes traduce la contingencia y la soledad radical de una subjetividad que experimenta en su nuevo poder-pensar la impotencia del pensamiento para fundarse a sí mismo en el (...) ejercicio discontinuo de lo que define al hombre, el cogito. (shrink)

Donation after cardiac death (DCD) traditionally occurs in two patient populations: (1) those who do not meet neurological death criteria but who have suffered severe neurological damage, and (2) those who are fully alert and awake but are dependent on machines. This case highlights the unique dilemma when a patient falls between these two populations—conscious and cognitively intact, but completely paralyzed except for limited eye movement, afflicted by what the medical community refers to as locked-in syndrome. Prompted by the treatment (...) team’s discomfort, an ethics consultant examined whether the team was obligated to discuss a decision to donate with the patient, who was a registered organ donor. This article shows how, in determining whether or not to talk to the patient or family during end-of-life decision making, the weight assigned to the various ethical concerns in the case— the patient’s condition, the decision to be made, and the family’s agreement or disagreement regarding the patient’s wishes—can “swing the pendulum” of ethical analysis in different ways. The comfort of the patient must be accorded the highest priority, as well as the needs of the patient’s family. This case study highlights the nuanced contextual factors necessary to guide a treatment team’s approach to DCD for a patient with uncertain decision-making capacity. (shrink)

¿Hay algún retrato “verdadero” de Descartes? Si bien sabemos, salvo unas pocas excepciones, quiénes pintaron o grabaron el retrato de Descartes, reconocemos a Descartes sin saber si los cuadros y los grabados lo retratan “verdaderamente”. ¿Qué tienen en común los grabados de Hellemans y del autor desconocido de “Descartes como Fausto” con el cuadro de Weenix? La respuesta es inequívoca: los libro; hasta tal punto que el libro funge como un atributo. El ícono de la filosofía moderna es el que (...) se esconde para pensar; es el que, desde el secreto detrás de la máscara, mira al espectador y lo obliga, bajo el prisma de la iconografia, a devolverse del mundo de la representación a la letra del texto. (shrink)

Prisoners are legally categorized as a vulnerable group for the purposes of medical research, but their vulnerability is not limited to the research context. Prisoner-patients may experience lower standards of care, fewer options for treatment, violations of privacy, and the use of inappropriate surrogates as a result of their status. This case study highlights some of the ways in which a prisoner-patient’s vulnerable status impacted the care he received. The article argues the following: (1) Prisoner-patients are entitled to the same (...) quality of care as all other patients, and healthcare providers should be vigilant to ensure that the stigma of incarceration does not influence care decisions. (2) Options for treatment should reflect what is most medically appropriate in the hospital or other healthcare setting, even when not all treatments would be available in the correctional setting. (3) The presence of guards at the bedside requires that additional measures be taken to protect the privacy and confidentiality of prisoner-patients. (4) When endof-life decisions must be made for an incapacitated patient, prison physicians are not well placed to act as surrogate decision makers, which heightens the obligations of the healthcare professionals in the hospital to ensure an ethically supportable process and outcome. Therefore, healthcare professionals should provide extra protection for those prisoner-patients who do not have decision-making capacity, by utilizing a robust process for decision making such as those used for incapacitated patients without surrogates, rather than relying solely on prison physicians as surrogates. (shrink)

Assertions about metaphysical modality play central roles in philosophical theorizing. For example, when philosophers propose hypothetical counterexamples, they often are making a claim to the effect that some state of affairs is possible. Getting the epistemology of modality right is thus important. Debates have been preoccupied with assessing whether imaginability—or conceivability, insofar as it’s different—is a guide to possibility, or whether it is rather intuitions of possibility—and modal intuitions more generally—that are evidence for possibility claims. The dissertation argues that the (...) imagination plays a subtler role than the first view recognizes, and a more central one than the second view does. In particular, it defends an epistemology of metaphysical modality on which someone can acquire modal knowledge in virtue of having performed certain complex imaginative exercises. (shrink)

Es importante entender la posición de Aristóteles y su diferenciacon respecto a la de Platón. No se trata solamente de explicar elporqué del paso de la división tripartita del alma –racional,irascible y concupiscible– a la división bipartita –racional eirracional–, sino, también, de advertir y ser consciente de lasprofundas implicaciones que este paso tiene y, sobre todo, susconsecuencias en el nuevo estatuto del deseo en la vida moral.

La homogeneidad de la Naturaleza, concebida como un todo racional y la universalidad del método se implican en Spinoza. Del principio de la unidad de la sustancia, o sea de la unidad de la Naturaleza tomada como natura naturans y natura naturata, se sigue que no puede existir un método que preceda al conocimiento filosófico. Ahora, si el carácter indisociable de la filosofía y del mos geometricus es efectivo, se debe a la total inteligibilidad para el hombre de la esencia (...) de Dios y de las cosas, ya que de ella se sigue que el conocimiento verdadero, es decir, adecuado, procede del todo a las partes. Con Spinoza, el racionalismo absoluto quiere acabar con el misterio que rodea la razón o que le subyace, misterio que hacía afirmar a Descartes en su tercera meditación que “es propio de la naturaleza de lo infinito que yo,siendo finito, no pueda comprenderlo”. La filosofía de Spinoza se presenta como un intelectualismo íntegro, una doctrina de la necesidad y de la libertad. Mas, podemos preguntarnos: ¿no hay aquí una contradicción entre necesidad y libertad? ¿Será que la filosofía de Spinoza es incoherente? O, dicho en otros términos, ¿es posible para el hombre actuar dentro de un determinismo tan estricto? (shrink)

In his discussion of rhythmic poetry the ninth-century theorist Aurelian of Réôme said that “meter is system with measure , but rhythm is measure without system and is discerned through the number of syllables.” For Aurelian rhythm pertained to a particular type of Latin poetry, one which bore a certain similarity to metric poetry but did not scan by the system of metrics. In rhythmic poetry the number of syllables per line and the “judgment of the ear” determine the structure (...) of the verse. This was poetry without a set of laws to govern it, the unlearned work of “vulgar” poets. (shrink)

Literature is recognised as having significantly influenced the development of modern psychoanalytic thought. In recent years psychoanalysis has drawn increasingly on the literary and artistic traditions of western culture and moved away from its original medical–scientific context. Originally published in 1991 _The Chamber of Maiden Thought _ is an original and revealing exploration of the seminal role of literature in forming the modern psychoanalytic model of the mind. The crux of the 'post-Kleinian' psychoanalytic view of personality development lies in the (...) internal relations between the self and the mind's 'objects'. Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell show that these relations have their origins in the drama of identifications which we can see played out metaphorically and figuratively in literature, which presents the self-creative process in aesthetic terms. They argue that psychoanalysis is a true child of literature rather than merely the interpreter or explainer of literature, illustrating this with some examples from clinical experience, but drawing above all on close scrutiny of the dynamic mental processes presented in the work of Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, Emily Bronte and George Eliot. _The Chamber of Maiden Thought_ will encourage psychoanalytic workers to respond to the influence of literature in exploring symbolic mental processes. By bringing psychoanalysis into creative conjunction with the arts, it enables practitioners to tap a cultural potential whose insights into the human mind are of immense value. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that we have a great deal of freedom to imagine what we choose. This paper explores a thesis—what we call “intentionalism (about the imagination)”—that provides a way of making this evident (if vague) truism precise. According to intentionalism, the contents of your imaginings are simply determined by whatever contents you intend to imagine. Thus, for example, when you visualize a building and intend it to be of King’s College rather than a replica of the college (...) you have imagined the former rather than the latter because you intended to imagine King’s College. This is so even if the visual image you conjure up equally resembles either. This paper proposes two kinds of counterexamples to intentionalism and discusses their significance. In particular, it sketches a positive account of how many sensory imaginings get to be about what they are about, which explains how the causal history of our mental imagery can prevent us from succeeding in imagining what we intended. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt brings the traditionally ontological practice of phenomenology into social and political philosophy. She does this in two ways: by employing phenomenological methods in her approach to examining the world around her and by showing how phenomenology is related to ethical life through her description of thinking. In this article, I explore the first of these ways by locating Arendt’s methods in relation to Martin Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology, as given in the Being and Time. Arendt’s usage of phenomenological (...) methods is clear in her examinations of banal evil and modern judicial systems. These topics lead to a discussion of how thinking, for Arendt, is a phenomenological activity that has bearing on ethical life. I will turn to Arendt’s essay, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” to clarify how phenomenology, as characteristic of the thinking Arendt prescribes, is ethically important. (shrink)

Reflecting on our engagement with fiction has compelled some theorists to expand the domain of the mental. They have posited a novel conative state, so-called “i-desire”. The central thesis of this approach is that i-desire relates to imagination in the same way as desire relates to belief. We formulate principles which are plausible consequences of this thesis. We then put pressure on these principles by focusing on desire concepts such as hoping, and show that the imaginative analogues of these concepts—if (...) such there be—do not satisfy the principles. We conclude by considering what our result suggests about the relationship between i-desire and propositional attitude psychology. (shrink)