Ces deux essais tournent autour des deux thèmes de prédilection de Maurice Clavelin. Le premier, Galilée ou la naissance de la science moderne, interroge l'un des tournants les plus importants de l'histoire des sciences : le " moment Galilée ". L'auteur montre que ce n'est pas une simple critique des idées traditionnelles ou une meilleure attention portée aux données de l'observation qui caractérise la science de ce génie. Rallié aux théories de Copernic, Galilée crée une vraie science mathématisée du mouvement, (...) véritable révolution conceptuelle qui ouvre une ère nouvelle à la spéculation sur la Nature, et signe ainsi l'acte de naissance de la science moderne. Le second aborde sous un angle inédit le rapport entre science et philosophie. Il montre qu'au début du XXe siècle, et après une longue stagnation, la théorie empiriste de la connaissance reprend forme et rigueur sous l'influence combinée de la logique symbolique et de l'interprétation logiciste des mathématiques. Le rôle de Russell est ici décisif, comme ses réinterprétations par Wittgenstein, Quine, et le cercle de Vienne. Un livre qui clôt l'oeuvre d'un grand philosophe des sciences. (shrink)

How does literature illuminate the way we live? Maurice Natanson, a prominent champion of phenomenology, draws upon this method's unique power to show how fiction can highlight aspects of experience that are normally left unexamined. By exploring the structure of the everyday world, Natanson reveals the "uncanny" that lies at the core of the ordinary. Phenomenology--which involves the questioning of that which we usually take for granted--is for Natanson the essence of philosophy. Drawing upon his philosophical predecessors Edmund Husserl, Alfred (...) Schutz, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Natanson paves his own way with stories and examples that themselves bear witness to how phenomenology occurs in literature. In considering such works as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Natanson shows how literature opens us to the domain of possibility and how metaphor offers philosophical power when we think about freedom and change. This book, written by one of the twentieth century's leading phenomenologists, will interest students in philosophy and in literature. They will value the work particularly for its clarification of concepts and terms that frequently emerge in the contemporary intellectual climate. (shrink)

Care Ethics and Poetry is the first book to address the relationship between poetry and feminist care ethics. The authors argue that morality, and more specifically, moral progress, is a product of inquiry, imagination, and confronting new experiences. Engaging poetry, therefore, can contribute to the habits necessary for a robust moral life—specifically, caring. Each chapter offers poems that can provoke considerations of moral relations without explicitly moralizing. The book contributes to valorizing poetry and aesthetic experience as much as it does (...) to reassessing how we think about care ethics. (shrink)

The belief of Gallie, Danto, and others that history is constructing narratives is too simplistic and neglects the role of inquiry and discovery. Teleology in history - only events relevant to a known outcome find a place in a work -while similar to that in narratives is not decisive, since in any explanation the explicandum controls the explicans to some extent. History is not recounting a linear sequence of intelligible human actions but is an analysis of a complex pattern of (...) change into factors that served to make it what it was. Social backgrounds and conditions that are influences but not actually parts of the story of actions are crucial; the fundamental relationship is part to whole, not antecedent to consequent. (shrink)

Ethical care is beginning to be recognised as care that accounts for the views of those at the receiving end of care. However, in the context of palliative and supportive district nursing care, the patients’ and their carers’ views are seldom heard. This qualitative research study explores these views. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 26 patients with palliative and supportive care needs receiving district nursing care, and 13 of their carers. Participants were recruited via community nurses and hospices (...) between September 2010 and October 2011. Post-structural discourse analysis is used to examine how discourses operate on a moral level. One discourse, ‘busyness’, is argued to preclude a moral form of nursing care. The discourse of friendship is presented to contrast this. Discussion explores Gallagher’s ‘slow ethics’ and challenges the currently accepted ways of measuring to improve quality of care concluding that quality cannot be measured. (shrink)

A collection of one man's essays in book form tends to be viewed today with some suspicion, if not hostility, by philosophical critics. It would seem that the author is guilty of an academic sin of pride: causing or helping to cause separately conceived articles to surpass their original station and assume a new life, a grander articulation. It can hardly be denied that the essays which follow must face this sullen charge, for they were composed at different times for (...) different sorts of audiences and, for the most part, have already been published. Their appearance in a new form will not allay commonplace criticisms: there are repetitions, certain key terms are defined and defined again in various places, a few quotations reappear, and, beyond this, the essays are unequal in range, depth, and fundamental intent. But it is what brings these essays together that constitutes, I trust, their collective merit. Underlying the special arguments that are to be found in each of the chapters is a particular sense of reality, not a thesis or a theory but rather a way of seeing the world and of appreciating its texture and design. It is that sense of reality that I should like to speak of here. Philosophy stands in a paradoxical relationship to mundane ex istence: it is at once its critique and one of its possibilities. (shrink)

Technology and its interfaces with nursing care, patients and carers, and the home are many and varied. To date, healthcare services research has generally focussed on pragmatic issues such access to and the optimization of technology, while philosophical inquiry has tended to focus on the ethics of how technology makes the home more hospital like. However, the ethical implications of the ways in which technology shapes the subjectivities of patients and carers have not been explored. In order to explore this, (...) poststructural theory, in particular the work of Butler, Foucault, and Deleuze, is used to theorize the relationship between subjectivity and materiality as ethically mandated on producing rather than precluding the development of subjectivities in novel ways. This theoretical understanding is then utilized through a process of ‘plugged in’ as described by Jackson and Massie that aims to link empirical data, research, and philosophical inquiry. Through this process, it is suggested that power, which the empirical data demonstrate, is frequently exercised through medical discourses and restricts patients' and carers' ability to shape the material environment of the home as a place to live and be cared for in palliative stages of illness. Alternative discourses are suggested both from the empirical data as well as other research, which may offer patients and carers the possibility of reclaiming power over the home and their subjectivities. Finally, the dichotomy between the home and hospital, mediated via technology, is posited as being problematic. It is argued the dichotomy is false and should be moved away from in order to allow an ethical embrace of technology in palliative care. (shrink)

Au cours des dernières décennies, d'importants philosophes tels Walter B. Gallie, Arthur Danto, Louis Mink, Hayden White et Paul Ricoeur ont mis l'accent sur le rôle de la narration en histoire. Le présent texte rappelle les thèses de ces auteurs et porte ensuite une attention particulière aux travaux de David Carr voulant que l'action historique elle-même ait une structure narrative. L'article discute des conséquences de ce « narrativisme » en prenant parti dans un débat alimenté par des interventions comme celles (...) de William Dray et de Noël Carroll. Il soutient qu'une thèse «réaliste» en la matière risque de déboucher sur la réactualisation d'une forme de philosophie spéculative de l'histoire, ce qui ne va pas sans soulever quelques questions à propos de l'analyse politique et de la pratique de l'histoire. (shrink)

Citizenship rights have become vital to our sense of personal identity and social membership in modern society. Roche argues that today we have to shift from the conventional postwar politics of social rights to a new politics of social obligations and personal responsibility.

Daniel Charles, musicologue, esthéticien, philosophe, fut l’un des traducteurs de Procès et réalité, d’A. N. Whitehead. Dans ce procès tendant à la constitution d’un « sujet-superject », il avait décelé une « causalité à rebours » permettant de revenir à l’origine des « préhensions » à l’œuvre dans le procès du monde. Si cela était seulement possible, ce serait une incitation à remonter aux sources de son itinéraire pour s’engager avec lui dans les nombreuses voies qu’il a suivies. Au moins (...) p... (shrink)

Quality of care is a prominent discourse in modern health‐care and has previously been conceptualised in terms of ethics. In addition, the role of knowledge has been suggested as being particularly influential with regard to the nurse–patient–carer relationship. However, to date, no analyses have examined how knowledge (as an ethical concept) impinges on quality of care. Qualitative semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 26 patients with palliative and supportive care needs receiving district nursing care and thirteen of their lay carers. Poststructural (...) discourse analysis techniques were utilised to take an ethical perspective on the current way in which quality of care is assessed and produced in health‐care. It is argued that if quality of care is to be achieved, patients and carers need to be able to redistribute and redevelop the knowledge of their services in a collaborative way that goes beyond the current ways of working. Theoretical works and extant research are then used to produce tentative suggestions about how this may be achieved. (shrink)

Judith Butler is one of the most influential late 20th and early 21st century philosophers in regard to left wing politics, as well as an active campaigner for social justice within the United States and worldwide. Her academic work has been foundational to the academic discipline of queer theory and has been extensively critiqued and applied across a hugely wide range of disciplines. In addition, Butler's work itself is extensive covering topics such as gender, sexuality, race, literary theory, and warfare. (...) This article can only serve as a taster for the potential application of her work in relation to nursing, which is in its infancy. This introduction covers three of the potentially most productive themes in Butler's work, namely power, performativity, and ethics. Each of these themes are critically explored in turn, sometimes in relation to their actual application in nursing literature, but also in relation to their potential for producing novel critiques of nursing practice. Suggestions are made about how Butler's work can develop nursing research and practice. The article concludes with a short summary of Butler's key works as well as suggested reading for people interested in examining how her theories have been applied across different academic settings. (shrink)

This is an interpretative and evaluative study of the thought of Antonio Gramsci, the founding father of the Italian Communist Party who died in 1937 after ten years of imprisonment in Fascist jails. It proceeds by a rigorous textual analysis of his Prison Notebooks, the scattered notes he wrote during his incarceration. Professor Finocchiaro explores the nature of Gramsci's dialectical thinking, in order to show in what ways Gramsci was and was not a Marxist, as well as to illustrate correspondences (...) with the work of Hegel, Croce, and Bukharin. The book provides a critical reappraisal of Gramsci as a thinker and of the dialectical approach as a mode of inquiry. (shrink)