Researchers interested in children's understanding of mind have claimed that the ability to ascribe beliefs and intentions is a late development, occurring well after children have learned to speak and comprehend the speech of others. On the other hand, there are convincing arguments to show that verbal communication requires the ability to attribute beliefs and intentions. Hence if one accepts the findings from research into children's understanding of mind, one should predict that young children will have severe difficulties in verbal (...) communication. Conversely, if this prediction fails, this casts doubt on the claim that young children lack meta-representational skills. Using insights from Relevance Theory, an experiment was designed to test children's ability to recover a speaker's intended referent in situations in which the speaker's words underdetermine the referent. Results suggest that children's skills are comparable to those of untutored adults in similar situations. Thus this study indirectly casts doubt on the claim that young children lack meta-representational skills. (shrink)

Discusses concepts of agency and free will from the perspective of clinical practice and feminism. Following a definition of agency that locates it in a relational context , the problematized nature of subjective experience is explored from both a feminist and a psychoanalytic perspective. These considerations set the stage for examining the contradictions and dilemmas of clinical practice devoted to individual change and improving lives as well as political values and ideology devoted to social change, suggesting the history of incest (...) in Western culture and practice as an example. The need to act/practice despite uncertainty is acknowledged, relating the position of the practitioner to the responsibilities of being a parent. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Comments on the agency papers by B. D. Slife , M. Gergen , R. N. Williams , and G. S. Howard . In response to these papers, M. S. Richardson states that the construct of agency/empowerment is replaced with embodied empowerment, the idea of which needs to be developed in a moral concept. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Surgical devices are often marketed before there is good evidence of their safety and effectiveness. Our paper discusses the ethical issues associated with the early marketing and use of new surgical devices from the perspectives of the six groups most concerned. Health Canada, which is responsible for licensing new surgical devices, should amend their requirements to include rigorous clinical trials that provide data on effectiveness and safety for each new product before it is marketed. Industry should comply with all Health (...) Canada requirements to obtain licenses for new products. Until Health Canada requires effectiveness and safety data, industry should cooperate with physicians in appropriate studies before releasing new products and should make balanced presentations of all the available evidence. Surgeons should, before using a new surgical device, assess the evidence on its effectiveness and safety and ensure they are properly trained and competent in using the device. Surgeons should provide their patients with an evaluation of the available evidence and inform them about possible complications and the surgeon's level of experience with the new device. Patients, who should be given an honest evaluation of the available evidence, possible complications, and the surgeon's experience, should be encouraged to evaluate the evidence and information to their own satisfaction to ensure that fully informed consent is given. Health institutions, responsible for regulating practice within their walls, should review new devices for safety, effectiveness, and economic impacts, before allowing their use. They should also limit the use of new surgical devices to surgeons trained and competent in the new technology. Professional societies should provide guidance on the early adoption of new surgical devices and technologies. We urge all those involved in the development, licensing, and use of new surgical devices to aim for higher ethical standards to protect the health and safety of patients requiring surgery. The lowest acceptable ethical standard would require device manufacturers to provide surgeons with accurate and timely information on the efficacy and safety of their products, allowing surgeons and patients to evaluate the evidence (and the significance of information not yet available) before surgery. (shrink)

This paper describes a discourse analysis of the process of interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) in the recovery from depression. It demonstrates how IPT is an effective treatment strategy for mental health nurses to utilise in the treatment of depression. The discourse analysis highlights how the development of more meaningful subject positions enables one woman to recover from her depression. The process of recovery is underpinned by an understanding of women's depression as promoted by contemporary social and cultural expectations for detachment and (...) reflexivity. This paper shows how IPT provides an opportunity for recovery from depression for one woman by facilitating a reconstruction of her subject positions in relation to others. The discourse analysis revealed that the therapist facilitated this through the use of a range of techniques: seeking information, exploring beliefs/values/assumptions, exploring communication patterns, exploring affective responses and exploring alternative subject positions. (shrink)

Family Medicine Groups (FMGs) are the most recently developed primary care organizations in Quebec (Canada). Nurses within FMGs play a central role for patients with chronic diseases (CD). However, this complex role and the nursing activities related to this role vary across FMGs. Inadequate knowledge of nursing activities limits the implementation of exemplary nursing practices. This study aimed to describe FMG nursing activities with patients with CD and to describe the facilitators and barriers to these activities. A multiple‐case study was (...) performed with ten nurses practicing among patients with CD in FMGs. Five data sources were used to provide an in‐depth description of nursing activities and the facilitators and barriers to the development of these activities. After qualitative data analysis, findings show that nursing activities are clustered into five domains: Global assessment of the patient, Care management, Health promotion, Nurse–physician collaboration, and Planning services for patients with CD. Activities vary depending on contextual factors identified in each case. This multiple‐case study provides a clear description of nursing activities with patients with CD. There is a need for improved nursing activities and expertise in domains of activities that are less present in FMGs, such as case management and interprofessional collaboration. (shrink)

Feminist theory is a central strand of cultural studies. This book explores the history of feminist cultural studies from the early work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, through the 1970s Women's Liberation Movement. It also provides a comprehensive introduction to the contemporary key approaches, theories and debates of feminist theory within cultural studies, offering a major re-mapping of the field. It will be an essential text for students taking courses within both cultural studies (...) and women's studies departments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hypatia’s Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers ed. by Linda Lopez McAllisterSue M. WeinbergLinda Lopez McAllister, editor. Hypatia’s Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv + 345. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $22.50.Hypatia: born in the fourth century A.D.: philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, teacher; brutally murdered in Alexandria in 415 A.D—whether for holding religious views regarded as heretical or because she (...) was a woman who dared to be a scholar and teacher remains a matter of speculation. Today, she gives her name to the journal for feminist philosophy. She is a symbol for those women who, over the centuries, have struggled to be part of the philosophical life of their time.Until very recently, the centuries that separated Hypatia from the present were assumed to have been a philosophical desert for women. But times have changed. Hypatia’s Daughters is a sign of this change. It contains eighteen articles on seventeen philosophers: Hypatia; Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, and Christine de Pisan from the Middle Ages; Elizabeth of Bohemia, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Anne Conway, Damaris Masham, Catharine Trotter, Belle van Zuylen and Mary Wollstonecraft from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Anne Doyle Wheeler and Harriet Taylor Mill from the nineteenth; Charlotte Perkins Oilman, Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, and Angela Davis from the late nineteenth century into contemporary times. Few are known as well as they deserve, but many names are familiar even to non-specialists. Their ideas, however, are another matter.The collection in no way constitutes a definitive selection of women philosophers; those discussed are not presented as the most significant women philosophers in the history of philosophy. (A different kind of study would be necessary for evaluations of that kind.) The women here studied have little in common as a group; they wrote on many topics of philosophical concern; their views and their supporting reasoning differ. Further, as the subjects of the articles differ in their ideas, so do the contributors’ approaches and their methods of studying those ideas differ. These differences are the strengths of a collection that is stimulating, enlightening, provocative. The following examples indicate their range.Andrea Nye examines the correspondence of Heloise and Abelard and, in a second article, of Elizabeth of Bohemia and Descartes. Heloise and Elizabeth are usually regarded as passive followers or, at best, no more than serious questioners seeking answers of their correspondents. Nye’s fresh look at the Heloise-Abelard correspondence finds not only important differences between two ways of thinking, but also sees already underlying their disagreement what she calls the “macroquestion” of philosophy’s future: philosophy as “a professional discipline independent of political or social concerns or... an ongoing critical and cultural discourse.” (25) Elizabeth’s persistent questions to Descartes reveal ideas that challenge his views, especially on moral issues and physiological-psychological [End Page 164] phenomena; these are views that have a greater complexity than the basic issue of mind-body interaction that is usually identified as central to their exchange.Writing on Harriet Taylor Mill, Jo Ellen Jacobs examines changing attitudes towards her subject, beginning with views of Taylor Mill’s contemporaries and moving through the decades into our time. She finds parallels between criticisms of Taylor Mill and attitudes towards the so-called intellectual woman. In times encouraging of women, Taylor Mill is regarded as having made important contributions to the development of J. S. Mill’s thinking, in addition to writing and speaking about her own ideas and positions that did not always follow those of J. S. Mill. In less encouraging times, her significance tends to be minimized.Hannah Arendt is not usually thought of as a feminist. Joanne Cutting-Gray, through her discussion of Arendt’s early book on Rahel Varnhagen, develops implications of that study for Arendt as a “feminist thinker,” in particular through her focus on “the politics of alterity.” Cutting-Gray finds in the Varnhagen biography “an analogy between Jewish and female alterity [that] can stretch our understanding of women and politics.” (281)And there is more, much more: Martha Brandt Bolton’s scholarly examination of the philosophical works... (shrink)

This chapter presents feminist perspectives on core topics in natural theology. It suggests that a philosophical openness to thinking about nature, about our human relationships, capacities, concepts, and conceptual scheme would enable a constructive feminist perspective on natural theology. Topics discussed include the feminist challenge to the western tradition of natural theology; myth, absolute truth, and male supremacy; sexual difference, transcendence, and religious epistemology. The views of feminist philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Michèle Le Doeuff, Mary Daly, Luce (...) Irigaray, and Patrice Haynes are analyzed. (shrink)

The paper builds on the postulate of “myths we live by,” which shape our imaginative life (and hence our social expectations), but which are also open to reflective study and reinvention. It applies this principle, in particular, to the concepts of love and vulnerability. We are accustomed to think of the condition of vulnerability in an objectifying and distancing way, as something that affects the bearers of specific (disadvantaged) social identities. Against this picture, which can serve as a pretext for (...) paternalist and controlling attitudes to the groups in question – notably to women – Anderson urges us to reimagine our vulnerability as a condition not merely of exposure to violence but of openness to mutual affection, love, and friendship. Hegel’s celebrated image of the owl of Minerva, which takes wing only with the coming of dusk, suggests an association of (philosophical) wisdom with negativity – with the experience of death or loss. Anderson, by contrast, proposes an alternative and more hopeful image of the dawn of enlightenment, in the guise of new ethical dispositions shaped by an emancipatory (and so, no longer an oppressive or sexist) conception of our capacity for love. Her main interlocutors or influences in this piece are Judith Butler (who contributes the idea of a “relational ontology”), Michèle Le Doeuff, and Mary Midgley. (shrink)

Improving how health care providers respond to medical injury requires an understanding of patients’ experiences. Although many injured patients strongly desire to be heard, research rarely involves them. Institutional review boards worry about harming participants by asking them to revisit traumatic events, and hospital staff worry about provoking lawsuits. Institutions’ reluctance to approve this type of research has slowed progress toward responses to injuries that are better able to meet patients’ needs. In 2015–2016, we were able to surmount these challenges (...) and interview 92 injured patients and families in the USA and New Zealand. This article explores whether the ethical and medico‐legal concerns are, in fact, well‐founded. Consistent with research about trauma‐research‐related distress, our participants’ accounts indicate that the pervasive fears about retraumatization are unfounded. Our experience also suggests that because being heard is an important (but often unmet) need for injured patients, talking provides psychological benefits and may decrease rather than increase the impetus to sue. Our article makes recommendations to institutional review boards and researchers. The benefits to responsibly conducted research with injured patients outweigh the risks to participants and institutions. (shrink)

Pamela Sue Anderson’s project about vulnerability and the silencing of the female speaker began with her realization of the female philosopher’s position within academia. Exposing the disavowal of the female “knower,” Anderson lays bare the mechanisms of excluding women from intellectual, artistic and religious discourse. Moving beyond the negative configuration of vulnerability associated with an openness to violence, Anderson refigures it as an openness to affection. The denial of thus refigured vulnerability has led to the literal and discursive oppression of (...) women through the “wilful ignorance” of their intellectual, emotional and sexual needs. In this article Filipczak analyses manifestations of this oppression exposed by female writers who illustrate the predicament discussed by Anderson in their fiction. Starting with Anderson’s refiguring of Antigone as a figure of dissent and marginality in her early work, Filipczak discusses Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, Morag Gunn from The Diviners by Margaret Laurence and Mary Magdalene from The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Michèle Roberts. What connects these characters is the fact that they are disavowed as knowers in intellectual, artistic or theological endeavours by male figures of authority who deny vulnerability as an openness to affection, and rely on social collusion with such denial. The analysis also refers to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Aritha van Herk’s Places Far From Ellesmere. (shrink)

Expecting Saving Mr. Banks to be a jolly jaunt about the creative development of the movie Mary Poppins (1964), I found myself waiting endlessly for the “jolliness” to begin—it never did. In fact, rather than joy, there was an ever-present sensation of tension as I watched the film. Having moved house myself in recent days (during a Queensland heat wave), the scenes of the Goff family leaving their home and trekking across hot, dusty Queensland were very emotional. However, seeing (...) the family patriarch Travers Goff (played by Colin Farrell) swig from an alcohol flask in a desperate manner told me that his was no “routine” family move. And, certainly, arriving at their destination—a dilapidated ranch home—shed even more light on the Goff family’s predicament: alcoholism and the cycle of employment and unemployment. Further, it is the downstream consequences of the family predicament that fuel the identity and behaviour of Mary Poppins—a fictional character created by Travers’ daughter, a. (shrink)

There is something about the debate over reproductive technologies of all kinds—from coerced use of Norplant to trait-selection technologies, to issues surrounding in vitro fertilization, to fetal tissue transplantation—that seems to invite dubious analogies. A Tennessee trial court termed Mary Sue and Junior Davis's frozen embryos “in vitro children” and applied a best-interests standard in awarding “custody” to Mary Sue Davis; the Warnock Committee drew an implicit analogy between human gametes and transplantable organs in its recommendation of a (...) voluntary, nonprofit system for collecting and distributing gametes in the United Kingdom; Owen Jones compares the right to trait-selection to the right to abortion; Robert Veatch once claimed that if a woman had signed an organ donation card and then died while pregnant, she had in effect given consent to the attempt to sustain the pregnancy after her death; John Robertson has argued that contract pregnancy poses no problems we have not already encountered with adoption; and Andrea Bonnicksen has compared the wonders of preembryonic genetic screening to the riches housed in the gold museum in Bogota, Colombia. (shrink)

For my invited contribution to this special issue of Religions on “Feminisms and the Study of ‘Religions,’” I focus on philosophy of religion and contestations over its relevance to the academic field of Religious Studies. I amplify some feminist philosophers’ voices—especially Pamela Sue Anderson—in corroboration with recent calls from Religious Studies scholars to diversify philosophy of religions in the direction of locating it properly within the current state of Religious Studies. I want to do this by thinking through two proposals (...) in productive tension: first, any philosophy of religions worthy of the name is intrinsically feminist; second, any philosophy of religions worthy of the name is intrinsically traditional. I want to use the productive tension between these two to illuminate ways calls for broadening the field can be enhanced when such calls are seen as both feminist and traditional. I proceed as follows. First, I note three instances of explicitly feminist work in philosophy of religions that do not suffer from the same narrowness as so-called “traditional” philosophy of religion. Religious Studies critics of philosophy of religion overstate the case in claiming feminist philosophy of religion is too narrow. Second, I develop a useful distinction between the concepts of “tradition” and “institution” to locate forces of oppression more precisely in dynamics of institutionalization so that we might rehabilitate tradition as a resource for combating institutionalized oppressiveness. I do this in response to the hegemony of current philosophers of religion who claim to speak about “the traditional god.” And third, I briefly coordinate four topics in religions from diverse feminist perspectives to help refine paths of inquiry for future philosophy of religions that is both feminist and traditional. My hope is that these clarify a philosophy of religions renewed through feminisms—moving from fringe to normative topics in institutionalized philosophy of religion, maintaining focus on actually existing human beings rather than hypothetically existing transcendent entities. I turn our attention to technical issues surrounding the status of mae chis, Buddhist laity who seek monastic recognition in Theravada. I turn our attention to struggles over fitting criteria for leadership between Mary Magdalene and Peter in early Christian contexts. I have us listen to Muslim women who seek to speak for themselves, many of whom describe Muhammad as a feminist. I have us listen to Anderson’s criticism of arguments about the (non)existence of a god and her promotion of human yearning as guided by regulative ideals as a pointed challenge to institutionalized philosophy of religion. In all these ways and more, feminist challenges to institutionalized philosophy of religion further contribute to diversifying field. (shrink)

Developing and implementing artificial intelligence (AI) systems in an ethical manner faces several challenges specific to the kind of technology at hand, including ensuring that decision-making systems making use of machine learning are just, fair, and intelligible, and are aligned with our human values. Given that values vary across cultures, an additional ethical challenge is to ensure that these AI systems are not developed according to some unquestioned but questionable assumption of universal norms but are in fact compatible with the (...) societies in which they operate. This is particularly pertinent for AI research and implementation across Africa, a ground where AI systems are and will be used but also a place with a history of imposition of outside values. In this paper, we thus critically examine one proposal for ensuring that decision-making systems are just, fair, and intelligible—that we adopt a principle of explicability to generate specific recommendations—to assess whether the principle should be adopted in an African research context. We argue that a principle of explicability not only can contribute to responsible and thoughtful development of AI that is sensitive to African interests and values, but can also advance tackling some of the computational challenges in machine learning research. In this way, the motivation for ensuring that a machine learning-based system is just, fair, and intelligible is not only to meet ethical requirements, but also to make effective progress in the field itself. (shrink)

Here is Lukcs among his friends, lovers, and peers in those important years before 1918, when he converted to Communism and Marxism at the age of thirty-nine.

_Jung and the Human Psyche: An Understandable Introduction_ presents a comprehensive introduction to Jungian theory, taking the reader through the major themes of Jung's work in a clear way, relating such concepts to individual experience. Drawing on her extensive experience in practicing and teaching Jungian psychology, Mary Ann Mattoon succeeds in making the fundamental insights of Jung's work accessible. The major topics of Jungian psychology are presented in a manner that is clear, emotionally engaging, well illustrated and non-dogmatic. Areas (...) covered include: The visible psyche: ego, persona, typology. The hidden psyche: self, shadow, unconscious, archetypes, instincts. Becoming who we are: early development, gender. Obstacles and helps to growth: complexes, projection, psychopathology. Helps from the psyche: psychic energy, self-regulation/compensation, symbol, synchronicity, creativity. _Jung and the Human Psyche_ provides an original and imaginative introduction to Jung's work, and will appeal to students of Jungian psychology, those considering training in Jungian analysis, and anyone interested in Jungian psychology. (shrink)

M. M. McCabe presents a selection of her essays which explore the Platonic method of conversation: how it may inform our understanding both of Plato and of his predecessors and successors, and how its centrality accounts for the connections between argument, knowledge, and virtue in the texts McCabe examines.

This paper aims to show that Sartre’s later work represents a valuable resource for feminist scholarship that remains relatively untapped. It analyses Sartre’s discussions of women’s attitude towards their situation from the 1940s, 1960s, and 1970s, alongside Beauvoir’s account of women’s situation in The Second Sex, to trace the development of Sartre’s thought on the structure of gendered experience. It argues that Sartre transitions from reducing psychological oppression to self-deception in Being and Nothingness to construing women as ‘survivors’ of it (...) in The Family Idiot. Then, it underlines the potential for Sartre’s mature existentialism to contribute to current debates in feminist philosophy by illuminating the role of the imagination in women’s psychological oppression. (shrink)