In this paper we want to briefly illustrate the ways in which technical, ethical and political judgements of various kinds are interwoven in the processes of healthcare decision-making in the UK. Drawing upon the research for the “Choices in Health Care” project we will borrow the notion of the hidden curriculum from education to illuminate the nature of resource allocation decision processes. In particular we will indicate some of the fundamental but largely hidden political factors in play in these processes (...) and the importance of the inchoate and implicit notion of “NHS values” in shaping UK resource allocation policies. We suggest that these more diffuse, holistic and system level value judgements are both central to understanding priority setting and at the same time difficult to reduce or abstract out into lists of single values/principles. (shrink)

What is good prescribing? In this paper we will look at the kinds of criteria which are relevant to evaluating prescribing. In particular we wish to challenge, or at least re-frame, the picture of prescribing as an essentially technical process. In so doing we hope to indicate something more general about the power, and limitations, of technical rationality in health care, and to contribute something to work in health care technology assessment. Finally we hope this discussion will act as a (...) stimulus towards a much needed revision of the way ‘good’ prescribing is defined by current policies, guidelines and protocols. (shrink)

In chapters ranging from "The Beautiful, the Dainty, and the Dumpy" to "Skin-deep or In the Eye of the Beholder?" Nick Zangwill investigates the nature of beauty as we conceive it, and as it is in itself. The notion of beauty is currently attracting increased interest, particularly in philosophical aesthetics and in discussions of our experiences and judgments about art. In The Metaphysics of Beauty, Zangwill argues that it is essential to beauty that it depends on the ordinary features (...) of things. He uses this principle to defend the notion of the aesthetic, to call for a version of aesthetic formalism, and to reconsider the reality of beauty. The Metaphysics of Beauty brings beauty to the center of intellectual consciousness in a manner informed by contemporary metaphysics and engages with beauty as an enduring object of human thought and experience. (shrink)

The point of departure for this article is the observation that, despite his own personal involvement as an engaged intellectual, Pierre Bourdieu offers a very thin account of social movement activism, and one pre-empted by the rather limited concept of ‘crisis’. The aim of the article, however, is to argue that the central concepts of Bourdieu’s theory of practice can be used to provide an effective and interesting basis for the analysis of social movements, protest and contention. To this end (...) the article demonstrates how the concepts of habitus, capital and field, in particular, resonate with important findings from the social movement literature. The focus of the article is limited to an engagement with Bourdieu. It connects with other work by the author, however, in which he has argued that Bourdieu’s framework can be used to address very serious problems in social movement theory. (shrink)

A pervasive and influential argument appeals to trivial truths to demonstrate that the aim of inquiry is not the acquisition of truth. But the argument fails, for it neglects to distinguish between the complexity of the sentence used to express a truth and the complexity of the truth expressed by a sentence.

In their recent target article, Bluhm et al. (2023) discuss the construct of “invasiveness” as it relates to medical treatments, and in particular to treatments that affect brain function. Cruciall...

Drawing upon ethnographic data, this article analyses 'vocabularies of motive' amongst individuals who work out at a private health club in the Greater Manchester area (UK). The article draws a distinction between motives for starting at a gym and motives for continuing, and analyses each separately. It also seeks to draw out, in the latter case, the many motives which conflict with a stereotypical view of 'working out' found in some academic accounts. Working out is not only an instrumental means (...) of cultivating valued bodily attributes, it is argued, nor are its attractions necessarily all 'bodily' (at least narrowly defined) in nature. (shrink)

Theodicy, the enterprise of searching for greater goods that might plausibly justify God’s permission of evil, is often criticized on the grounds that the project has systematically failed to unearth any such goods. But theodicists also face a deeper challenge, one that places under question the very attempt to look for any morally sufficient reasons God might have for creating a world littered with evil. This ‘anti-theodical’ view argues that theists (and non-theists) ought to reject, primarily for moral reasons, the (...) project of ‘justifying the ways of God to men’. Unfortunately, this view has not received the serious attention it deserves, particularly in analytic philosophy of religion. Taking my cues from such anti-theodicists as Kenneth Surin, D.Z. Phillips and Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, I defend several reasons for holding that the way of thinking about God and evil enshrined in theodical discourse can only add to the world’s evils, not remove or illuminate them. (shrink)

In this article I discuss some of the findings of an on-going ethnographic study of two once-weekly circuit training classes held in one of the growing number of private health and fitness clubs. The article has four aims. First, to demonstrate and explore the active role of the body in a central practice of body modification/maintenance: i.e. circuit training. Second, to demonstrate that circuit training is a social structure which both shapes the activity of the agent and is shaped by (...) that (shaped) agent. I aim also to explore this structuration process. Third, to draw out a number of aspects of the sociality of body maintenance/modification. Training, I argue, is a form of symbolic interaction, localized within specific and durable social networks. The final aim of the article is to weave these various claims together into a coherent overall account of circuit training as a form of body modification. As an investigation of the embodied nature of practices of body maintenance and the active role of social agents in relation to these practices the article rejoins an important strand of sociological investigations of ‘the body’. At the same time, however, the article seeks to challenge those approaches, often rooted in Foucauldian analysis, which portray the body as ‘docile’ in relation to body maintenance. Foucauldian inspired studies often reify practices of modification as ‘technologies’ or ‘apparatuses’, ignoring the active role of embodied agents in these practices and eliding the difference between texts which prescribe ways of acting and the more messy and complex reality of those ways of acting. (shrink)

Eddo Evink criticizes Emmanuel Levinas’s supposed view that all acts of intentionality and rationality commit transcendental violence against their objects, including the Other. If this is so, Levinas undermines the possibility of his own philosophy. Evink further argues: that there are non-violent forms of intentionality and so intentionality is only potentially violent; that some non-violent counter-pole is needed to define violence; that there are contradictions in Levinas’s notion of violence; that Levinas, like empiricists, aspires to a metaphysical absolute untainted by (...) language; and that he presupposes the philosophical, ontological, and linguistic frameworks he criticizes. However, to answer these objections, one must understand Levinas as developing two distinct modalities of relationship: Being and Otherwise than Being. These modalities clash in the face-to-face relationship when the phenomenon of the face defects into responsibility for the Other. The epistemology and ontology of Being involve distinctive acts, affects, forms of temporality, and experiences of self that undergo a tectonic shift in confrontation with the ethically obligating Other. Here the focus is not on the violence of concepts ever seeking to subjugate the Other but rather on the Other whose summons both provokes knowledge to retreat and is able to be shown in a philosophy, even if that philosophy betrays the saying in the said, while also having the potential to reduce that betrayal. The focus should not be on transcendental violence tracking down and cornering the Other but on the Other ethically disrupting Being. With that focus, it becomes clear that concentrating on transcendental violence is a kind of violence. (shrink)

The paper aims to disarm arguments, prevalent in diverse philosophical contexts, that deny the legitimacy of attributions of propositional attitudes on the grounds that the putative subject lacks one or more of the requite concepts. Its strategy is to offer and defend an extremely minimal account on concept possession. The agenda of the paper broadens into a defence of the thesis that concepts are a linguistic epiphenomenon: talk about them emerges as the result of certain contingently available and pleonastic ways (...) of talking about propositional attitudes. (shrink)

There is a familiar teleological picture of epistemic normativity on which it is grounded in the goal or good of belief, which is taken in turn to be the acquisition of truth and the avoidance of error. This traditional picture has faced numerous challenges, but one of the most interesting of these is an argument that rests on the nearly universally accepted view that this truth goal, as it is known, is at heart two distinct goals that are in tension (...) with one another. This paper will look more closely at the standard way of understanding the truth goal, drawing out both its explicit and implicit features. My aim will be to show that this conception of the truth goal is deeply mistaken, to propose and defend an alternative model, and to show how this alternative model restores the unity of the goal and its potential to ground and explain the normative dimensions of belief. (shrink)

Skeptical theists purport to undermine evidential arguments from evil by appealing to the fact that our knowledge of goods, evils, and their interconnections is significantly limited. Michael J. Almeida and Graham Oppy have recently argued that skeptical theism is unacceptable because it results in a form of moral skepticism which rejects inferences that play an important role in our ordinary moral reasoning. In this reply to Almeida and Oppy's argument we offer some reasons for thinking that skeptical theism need not (...) lead to any such objectionable form of moral skepticism. (shrink)

We investigate a recently devised polyhedral semantics for intermediate logics, in which formulas are interpreted in n-dimensional polyhedra. An intermediate logic is polyhedrally complete if it is complete with respect to some class of polyhedra. The first main result of this paper is a necessary and sufficient condition for the polyhedral completeness of a logic. This condition, which we call the Nerve Criterion, is expressed in terms of Alexandrov’s notion of the nerve of a poset. It affords a purely combinatorial (...) characterisation of polyhedrally complete logics. Using the Nerve Criterion we show, easily, that there are continuum many intermediate logics that are not polyhedrally complete but which have the finite model property. We also provide, at considerable combinatorial labour, a countably infinite class of logics axiomatised by the Jankov–Fine formulas of ‘starlike trees’ all of which are polyhedrally complete. The polyhedral completeness theorem for these ‘starlike logics’ is the second main result of this paper. (shrink)

In some of his writings, George Psathas suggests that Alfred Schutz’s account of social-scientific methodology as constructing ideal types falls short of ethnomethodology’s approach, which, by giving an account of how actors produce their social order, exemplifies a kind of social-scientific following of Husserl’s stipulation that phenomenology return to “the things themselves”. By distinguishing Schutz’s phenomenology of the natural attitude which does return to the things themselves from his account of social scientific methodology, one can conceive various social-scientific methodologies legitimately (...) serving different scientific purposes with reference to the life-world basis, for instance, ideal–typical methodologies that might seek solutions to problems and ethnomethodological methods that capture actors’ production of order and mimic the phenomenological return to the things themselves. Despite delineating this distinction between phenomenology and ethnomethodology, which Psathas too makes, ethnomethodology reveals many of the investigative tendencies of phenomenology and the two can be seen to engage each other indirectly and interactively. Finally, ethnomethodologists maintain some intellectual, relevance-guided distance from the everyday actors they study, however minimal the distance between them and the actors they study may be. (shrink)

Offers a detailed critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy, including arguments about the imposition of democracy on foreign nations and hypocritical actions by America.

Recently, many historians of science have chosen to present their historical narratives from the ‘actors’-eye view’. Scientific knowledge not available within the actors’ culture is not permitted to do explanatory work. Proponents of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge purport to ground this historiography on epistemological relativism. I argue that they are making an unnecessary mistake: unnecessary because the historiographical genre in question can be defended on aesthetic and didactic grounds; and a mistake because the argument from relativism is in any (...) case incoherent.The argument of the present article is self-contained, but steers clear of metaphysical debates in the philosophy of science. To allay fears of hidden assumptions, the sequel, to be published in the following issue, will consider SSK’s prospects of succour from scientific realism, instrumentalism, and a metaphysical system of Bruno Latour’s own devising. (shrink)

This article describes and analyses the social network of key actors involved in the `inner circle' of the early UK punk movement in London. It is argued that the network and its structural properties are important if we wish to explain both the emergence of the movement and certain key conflicts within it. The article is empirically based and utilizes the methods of formal social network analysis. A further argument of the paper is that the concept of networks and these (...) formal methods for analysing them are both important for a sociological analysis of culture and cultural movements in particular. (shrink)

This paper investigates the historiographical utility of psychoanalysis, focussing in particular on retrospective explanations of demonic possession and exorcism. It is argued that while 'full-blown' psychoanalytic explanations-those that impose Oedipus complexes, anal eroticism or other sophisticated theoretical structures on the historical actors-may be vulnerable to the charge of anachronism, a weaker form of retrospective psychoanalysis can be defended as a legitimate historical lens. The paper concludes, however, by urging historians to look at psychoanalysis as well as trying to look through (...) it. Full-blown psychoanalysis is a bad historical lens but it may, in some cases, be an excellent explanatory template: a thorough understanding of how psychoanalytic therapy functions in the modern world is, for example, a good theoretical preparation for historians seeking to understand the sixteenth-century's demonological universe. (shrink)

Richard Rorty challenges Jurgen Habermas's belief that validity-claims raised within context-bound discussions contain a moment of universality validity. Rorty argues that immersion within contingent languages prohibits any neutral, context-independent ground, that one cannot predict the defense of one's assertions before any audience, and that philosophy can no more escape its contextual limitations than strategic counterparts. Alfred Schutz's phenomenological account of motivation, the reciprocity of perspectives, and the theoretical province of meaning can articulate Habermas's intuitions.Since any claim can be analyzed from (...) an observer's perspective for its because-motives, it can always be shown to be context-related; but to the participant involved in the in-order-to project of establishing a claim's validity, the claim appears objectively valid until counter-evidence surfaces. Rorty, even when explaining what it is to make a truth claim, resorts to the observer perspective and omits reference to the in-order-to perspective, within which alone unconditional validity becomes visible. Furthermore, the expectation that one's claim is universally valid depends not on an empirical prediction that one''s claim can survive hypothesized future possible audiences. Rather, because of the reciprocity of perspectives, making possible communication and a common life, theoreticians assume that others will recognize what they take to be objective or valid, independently of diverse biographical circumstances. Finally, within the theoretical province requiring relevances different from those of everyday life, philosophy articulates claims with a greater potential to arrive at universal validity than projects that aim less universally, in spite of the fact that its theoretical context is always susceptible to because motive analysis. (shrink)

Welfare and the Constitution defends a largely forgotten understanding of the U.S. Constitution: the positive or "welfarist" view of Abraham Lincoln and the Federalist Papers. Sotirios Barber challenges conventional scholarship by arguing that the government has a constitutional duty to pursue the well-being of all the people. He shows that James Madison was right in saying that the "real welfare" of the people must be the "supreme object" of constitutional government. With conceptual rigor set in fluid prose, Barber (...) opposes the shared view of America's Right and Left: that the federal constitutional duties of public officials are limited to respecting negative liberties and maintaining processes of democratic choice. Barber contends that no historical, scientific, moral, or metaethical argument can favor today's negative constitutionalism over Madison's positive understanding. He urges scholars to develop a substantive account of constitutional ends for use in critiquing Supreme Court decisions, the policies of elected officials, and the attitudes of the larger public. He defends the philosophical possibility of such theories while also offering a theory of his own as a starting point for the discussion the book will provoke. This theory holds, for example, that voucher schemes which drain resources from secular public schools to schools that would train citizens to submit to religious authority are unconstitutional; First Amendment issues aside, such schemes defeat what is undeniably an element of the "real welfare" of the people, individually and collectively: the capacity to think critically for oneself. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAnxiety is believed to have a disruptive effect on attentional control, supported by evidence of increased distractibility among high trait anxious individuals. However, how feelings of cur...

In The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity Michael D. Barber is the first to bring phenomenology to bear not just on the perspectives of McDowell or Brandom alone, but on their intersection.

God is thought of as hidden in at least two ways. Firstly, God's reasons for permitting evil, particularly instances of horrendous evil, are often thought to be inscrutable or beyond our ken. Secondly, and perhaps more problematically, God's very existence and love or concern for us is often thought to be hidden from us (or, at least, from many of us on many occasions). But if we assume, as seems most plausible, that God's reasons for permitting evil will (in many, (...) if not most, instances) be impossible for us to comprehend, would we not expect a loving God to at least make his existence or love sufficiently clear to us so that we would know that there is some good, albeit inscrutable, reason why we (or others) are permitted to suffer? In this paper I examine John Hick's influential response to this question, a response predicated on the notion of 'epistemic distance': God must remain epistemically distant and hence hidden from us so as to preserve our free will. Commentators of Hick's work, however, disagree as to whether the kind of free will that is thought to be made possible by epistemic distance is the freedom to believe that God exists, or the freedom to choose between good and evil, or the freedom to enter into a personal relationship with God. I argue that it is only the last of these three varieties of free will that Hick has in mind. But this kind of freedom, I go on to argue, does not necessitate an epistemically distant God, and so the problem of divine hiddenness remains unsolved.
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La teoria pleonastica de los conceptos continua siendo viable a pesar de las recientes criticas que ha recibido por parte de Robert J. Stainton (Critica, diciembre 1996). En particular el dominio de un concepto puede considerarse como la comprension de un termino que expresa tal concepto. Lo cual en ningun sentido amenaza el caracter deflacionario de la teoria pleonastica, en la medida en que tal comprension sea vista de una manera apropiada. Mas aun, recurrir a la nocion de un constituyente (...) estructural a un nivel sintactico profundo como el que vemos en linguistica contemporanea, no genera necesariamente una interpretacion robusta del lenguaje de los conceptos. -/- The pleonastic theory of concepts is still viable, notwithstanding criticisms recently brought against it by Robert J. Stainton (Crítica, December 1996). In particular, mastering a concept can be seen as understanding a term that expresses that concept, and seeing it in this way does not threaten the deflationary character of the pleonastic theory given a proper construal of understanding. Moreover, appeals to deeper-than-surface structural constituency of the kind familiar in contemporary linguistics do not necessarily engender a robust interpretation of concept-discourse. (shrink)

This book features papers written by renowned international scholars that analyze the interdependence of art, phenomenology, and social science. The papers show how the analysis of the production as well as the perception and interpretation of art work needs to take into consideration the subjective viewpoint of the artist in addition to that of the interpreter. Phenomenology allows a description of the subjectively centered life-world of the individual actor-artist or interpreter-and the objective structures of literature, music, and the aesthetic domain (...) in general. The perspective of social science serves to reconstruct the socio-historical structure involved in the creation and reception of the art work. The authors concentrate on this specific theoretical focus which combines both phenomenology and social science and offers an innovative framework for the analysis of works of art from the fields of literature, music, visual arts, photography, and film. Some of the contributions present creative interpretations of a variety of distinct art works in addition to the realization of theoretical reflections on the interdependence of arts, phenomenology, and social science. This book features papers that were presented at the international and interdisciplinary conference Phenomenology, Social Sciences, and the Arts, held at the University of Konstanz, May 2009, in commemoration of philosopher and social scientist Alfred Schutz, the developer of phenomenologically oriented sociology. It will appeal to researchers, scholars, and students in phenomenology, social sciences, art theory, and the arts.. (shrink)

According to Alfred Schutz’s theory of signification, based as it is on Husserl’s theory of appresentation, through marks and indications we overcome the small transcendences of space and time, through signs the medium transcendences of the Other’s difference from us, and through symbols the great transcendences of other finite provinces of meaning. This paper examines the implicat ions of the correlations between these transcendences and significations, and argues that Schutz’s order of significations reveals the profound irony that the more signifier-users (...) seek to tame and subdue transcendences through significations, the more they discover how transcendences escape their dominion. (shrink)

This paper takes up the Heideggerean question of difference. I argue that while Heidegger raises this question, his response to the question remains ambiguous and that this ambiguity pivots around the question of time. The bulk of the paper then looks at how Derrida and Deleuze respectively attempt to advance beyond Heidegger’s ambiguity regarding the questions of difference and time. Derrida is able to demonstrate the manner in which time—as delay—is constitutive of any attempt to think difference. I argue, however, (...) that his innovative articulation of “différance” maintains an extrinsic rather than intrinsic relation to difference in-itself. To achieve an intrinsic relation, it is necessary to turn to the work of Deleuze, particularly to his discussion of “nonsense” and “singularity.”. (shrink)

Research on metaphors has shown that individuals form associations between the verticality, brightness, and distance of stimuli and their valence. Building on the literature on conceptual metaphor...