Moira Gatens investigates the ways in which differently sexed bodies can occupy the same social or political space. Representations of sexual difference have unacknowledged philosophical roots which cannot be dismissed as a superficial bias on the part of the philosopher, nor removed without destroying the coherence of the philosophical system concerned. The deep structural bias against women extends beyond metaphysics and its effects are felt in epistemology, moral, social and political theory. The idea of sexual difference is contextualised in (...) _Imaginary Bodies_ and traced through the history of philosophy. Using her work on Spinoza, Gatens develops alternative conceptions of power, new ways of conceiving women's embodiment and their legal, political and ethical status. (shrink)

Why would the work of the 17th century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza concern us today? How can Spinoza shed any light on contemporary thought? In this intriguing book, Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd show us that in spite of or rather because of Spinoza's apparent strangeness, his philosophy can be a rich resource for cultural self-understanding in the present. _Collective Imaginings_ draws on recent re-assessments of the philosophy of Spinoza to develop new ways of conceptualising issues of freedom and (...) difference. This ground-breaking study will be invaluable reading to anyone wishing to gain a fresh perspective on Spinoza's thought. (shrink)

It describes and explains the patient-centered model examining and evaluating qualitative and quantitative research. It comprehensively covers the evolution and the six interactive components of the patient-centered clinical method, taking the reader through the relationships between the patient and doctor and the patient and clinician. All the editors are professors in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

It has typically been assumed that affective and social components of disagreement, such as trust and fair treatment, can be handled separately from substantive components, such as beliefs and logical principles. This has freed us to count as “deep” disagreements only those which persist even between people who have no animosity towards each other, feel equal to one another, and are willing to argue indefinitely in search of truth. A reliance on such ideal participants diverts us from the question of (...) whether we have swept away the opportunity for some real arguers to have their voices heard, and for those voices to determine the real substance of the disagreement. If affective and social issues need to be assessed side by side with belief differences and reasoning paradigms, investigating trust may assist us to understand and make progress on the affective and social components that are involved in disagreement. (shrink)

This paper treats a recalcitrant problem in Spinoza scholarship, namely, how to reconcile the conception of 'power' in his political writings with that found in his Ethics. Some have doubted the capacity of Spinoza's political philosophy to yield an adequate normative theory. If he is unable to provide a normative ground for political philosophy then perhaps this exposes a problem in Spinoza's philosophy taken as a whole. I argue that the considerable normative resources of his ethical and political philosophy, as (...) well their continuing relevance today, are best appreciated through attending to his notion of the exemplar. (shrink)

Parental burnout is a specific syndrome resulting from enduring exposure to chronic parenting stress. But why do some parents burn out while others, facing the same stressors, do not? The main aim of this paper was to propose a theory of parental burnout capable of predicting who is at risk of burnout, explaining why a particular parent burned out and why at that specific point in time, and providing directions for intervention. The secondary goal was to operationalize this theory in (...) a tool that would be easy to use for both researchers and clinicians. The results of this two-wave longitudinal study conducted on 923 parents suggest that the Balance between Risks and Resources (BR 2 ) theory proposed here is a relevant framework to predict and explain parental burnout. More specifically, the results show that (1) the BR 2 instrument reliably measures parents' balance between risks (parental stress-enhancing factors) and resources (parental stress-alleviating factors), (2) there is a strong linear relationship between BR 2 score and parental burnout, (3) parental burnout results from a chronic imbalance of risks over resources, (4) BR 2 predicts parental burnout better than job burnout and (5) among the risk and resource factors measured in BR 2, risks and resources non-specific to parenting (e.g., low stress-management abilities, perfectionism) equally predict parental and job burnout, while risks and resources specific to parenting (e.g., childrearing practices, coparenting) uniquely predict parental burnout. (shrink)

Clarke, Moira On the East coast of America, every 13 or 17 years, billions of red-eyed magicicadas emerge from underground. For the next few weeks every tree resounds with a near-deafening symphony, a courting ritual that has been measured at 94 decibels. Finally, the resulting offspring burrow back into the earth, there to remain inactive for the exact same duration, 13 or 17 years.

Moira Howes and Catherine Hundleby ABSTRACT: While anger can derail argumentation, it can also help arguers and audiences to reason together in argumentation. Anger can provide information about premises, biases, goals, discussants, and depth of disagreement that people might otherwise fail to recognize or prematurely dismiss. Anger can also enhance the salience of certain premises...

The paper applies the theoretical frameworks of epistemic injustice and narrativist philosophy of history to read the process of re-signification of an event that took place in a prison in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1978, called “Massacre in the Seventh Ward” or “Mutiny of the Mattresses”. By looking into this case, we explore the exercise of epistemic resistance through category expansion, drawing on the most recent developments on hermeneutical injustice as a deficiency in the application (and not (...) only in the content) of the available concepts. This allows us to identify the selected case as an example of hermeneutical injustice, and to highlight some characteristics of such injustice that remain under-analysed in the specialised literature, linked to agency, temporality, and the concrete forms adopted by resistance. Among the latter, we highlight the role that can be played by the exercise of what in philosophy of history has been called the “practical past”: an intervention in the dispute of meanings about the past, born out of an explicit commitment to the present. Finally, the conclusions present some caveats to be considered in the study of epistemic injustice in the context of institutions such as prisons. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the objectivity of persons is best understood in terms of intellectual virtue, the telos of which is an enduring commitment to salient and accurate information about reality. On this view, an objective reasoner is one we can trust to manage her perspectives, beliefs, emotions, biases, and responses to evidence in an intellectually virtuous manner. We can be confident that she will exercise intellectual carefulness, openmindedness, fairmindedness, curiosity, and other intellectual virtues in her reasoning. I (...) argue further that the cultivation and exercise of such virtues is a social phenomenon and thus challenge highly individualistic notions of intellectual character, epistemic autonomy, and personal objectivity. An advantage of this account of objectivity is that it better enables us to address bias in scientific research, science policy, and public debates about science. (shrink)

The global education crisis is a complex problem that requires change from teachers, school managers, civil society, implementers, planners, governments and donors. Addressing the issues that lie beneath this crisis requires new ways of working. Systems thinking is a suite of approaches to grappling with complex problems that is beginning to gain traction in international education. This innovative book brings together new research in the nascent field of systems thinking in international education to exemplify how systems thinking offers the tools, (...) frameworks and concepts to improve outcomes in education systems. (shrink)

Sets out Catholic teaching on hotly debated issues such as stem cell research, reproductive technologies, euthanasia and much more.

This book may be taken as a plea for a return to a teleological moral philosophy. Mrs Roberts examines responsibility and freedom in terms of human interests and purposes and seeks to establish the autonomy of the personal decision. F. H. Bradley's criteria for moral responsibility serves as a starting point, but Mrs Roberts finds these theoretical and remote. She builds up an account of the social context in which we learn to use words like 'responsibility', 'freedom' and 'action'. Ambiguities (...) in the use of 'action' and 'perception' are dealt with at length. (shrink)

There are three common objections that any broadly Aristotelian virtue theorist must face, insofar as he or she holds that acts must be performed from a firm and stable disposition in order to express virtue, and that virtue is in some way a praiseworthy fulfillment of human potential. Each of these objections accuses the virtuous person of not fully exercising his or her rationality and freedom, and thus of being somehow less than fully human.

Aristotle's Conception of Freedom MOIRA M. WALSH That human being is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's. ' 1. INTRODUCTION THERE IS NO PLACE in the Nicomachean Ethics, or the Politics, where Aristotle provides us with an explicit definition of freedom. Nevertheless, it is possible to glean Aristotle's notion of freedom from a series of passages in the Politics, in which Aristotle discusses such matters as the existence of the natural slave, and (...) the understanding of freedom underlying certain forms of democracy. This effort is useful insofar as it not only helps us to understand Aristotle, but also presents us with a conception of freedom interestingly different from many contemporary versions and perhaps worth our consideration. ~ The reader will notice that I deliberately retain, for the most part, the generic use of 'man' and of masculine pronouns in translating and commenting on Aristotle, a practice which cannot go without explanation in this day and age. Such terms in English convey just the same ambiguity as Aristode's Greek does when, for instance, he uses the masculine adjectives eleutheros or agathos as generic terms -- that is, they leave the reader uncertain as to whether women are considered capable of freedom or goodness in the same way that men are, with the suspicion that they are not. I do not share the opinion, apparently held by Aristotle, that members of my gender are.. (shrink)

"A collection of essays on the metaphysical, political, theological, ethical and psychological writings of Spinoza.

In this paper, I argue that adventurous approaches to physical activity can contribute more to well-being than approaches that have been shaped by fitness ideology. To defend this claim, I draw on work in philosophy and psychology concerning internal goods and intrinsic motivation, respectively. This work shows that motivating ourselves intrinsically and cultivating the internal goods of physical activity can contribute significantly to well-being. Unfortunately, the discourse and images associated with fitness culture tend to undermine intrinsic motivation and the cultivation (...) of internal goods. Consequently, approaches to physical activity shaped by fitness ideology often fail to support well-being. In contrast, I argue that an adventurous approach to physical activity better fosters intrinsic motivation and the pursuit of internal goods. To show this, I consider three examples of internal goods strongly associated with adventure – character development, enlivening kinesthetic and psychological e... (shrink)

With rapidly expanding technological capacity, research has outpaced the existing infrastructure of ethical and regulatory guidance. In the area of incidental findings, this is particularly true.The regulations under which most Institutional Review Boards operate were established over 25 years ago and have not been substantially altered in the intervening years. The technology available today that creates the opportunity for IFs was not conceived of, or considered, in the crafting of those regulations. Therefore, little guidance can be derived directly from these (...) regulations. Rather, aspects of existing ethical guidance and regulations can be adapted to assist IRBs and researchers in dealing with issues surrounding IFs. (shrink)

For individuals pursuing medically assisted gender transition, gender-affirming surgical treatments, such as oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries) and orchiectomy (removal of the testicles), cause sterility, and gender-affirming hormone treatment with medications (i.e., testosterone and estrogen) may negatively impact infertility. The major United States (US) medical associations already endorse fertility preservation (FP) through cryopreservation (i.e., “freezing” egg and sperm) for transgender individuals. Despite these endorsements from the relevant medical societies, medical insurance coverage for FP remains very limited in the US. Given (...) the high out-of-pocket costs for FP services, fertility preservation remains financially out of reach for many transgender individuals who may desire it. We present an ethical justification for universal FP coverage for all transgender and gender diverse (TGD) individuals who request this option during medically assisted gender transition. First, we argue that gender-affirming medical care is analogous to other medical interventions and treatment regimens that compromise fertility, such as cancer care, and that both types of interventions need to be afforded the same medical benefits and assistance in pursuing fertility goals. Second, we argue that the lack of FP for transgender individuals contributes to the ongoing and profound transphobia and anti-trans bias that has been exacerbated in the past several years across the healthcare landscape in the United States. We argue that the provision of FP coverage for transgender individuals is necessary for clinicians and third-party payers to state their unequivocal support for TGD patients and their healthcare needs. (shrink)

Robert Pinto and Laura Pinto advance a non-binary account of reason and emotion in the reasoning process and argue for a naturalistic understanding of objectivity that will allow for the evaluation of emotions as reasonable. Pinto and Pinto’s promising argument generates important and productive lines of inquiry. I suggest a few such lines of inquiry, including the idea that it may be important to support reflexivity and interpretive community with equanimity; that we should further examine the potential of new ideals (...) of objectivity that explicitly incorporate emotion and virtue; and finally, that we should craft methodologies to deepen our understanding of emotion in objective reasoning and fully realize its benefits. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that we should revise our understanding of physical fitness to include preparation for challenging physically mediated life experiences—such as aging, disability, illness, reproduction, and death—as an important goal of physical activity. Such a revision is needed because the messages about fitness we encounter through “fitness ideology” can undermine the cultivation of skills and perspectives important for finding meaning, equanimity, and even happiness in light of such experiences. Because one of the ways that fitness ideology undermines (...) personal growth and well-being is through the promotion of fear and denial of our mutability and mortality, I focus on death, generally the most... (shrink)

Trait emotional intelligence (“trait EI”) concerns our perceptions of our emotional abilities, that is, how good we believe we are in terms of understanding, regulating, and expressing emotions in order to adapt to our environment and maintain well-being. In this article, we present succinct summaries of selected findings from research on (a) the location of trait EI in personality factor space, (b) the biological underpinnings of the construct, (c) indicative applications in the areas of clinical, health, social, educational, organizational, and (...) developmental psychology, and (d) trait EI training. Findings to date suggest that individual differences in trait EI are a consistent predictor of human behavior across the life span. (shrink)

Feminist critiques of science show that systematic biases strongly influence what scientific communities find salient. Features of reality relevant to women, for instance, may be under-appreciated or disregarded because of bias. Many feminist analyses of values in science identify problems with salience and suggest better epistemologies. But overlooked in such analyses are important discussions about intellectual virtues and the role they play in determining salience. Intellectual virtues influence what we should find salient. They do this in part by managing the (...) emotions, which are cognitively involved in what we actually do find salient. One reason intellectual virtues do not factor more strongly in feminist epistemology is the mistaken assumption that they could not serve as explicit epistemic community standards for scientific inquiry. There are good reasons, however, to think in terms of community intellectual virtue and consequently, to advance explicit public standards of intellectual virtue for scientific research. To show how explicit public standards for intellectual virtue might improve reasoning in biased conditions, I analyze a striking oversight in several evolutionary immunological hypotheses concerning women's reproduction and sexuality. I conclude that feminist epistemology would benefit from greater consideration of intellectual virtues, particularly in connection with social epistemological insights. (shrink)