Many academic philosophers and ethicists are appointed to teach ethics to medical students. We explore exactly what this task entails. In South Africa the Health Professions Council's curriculum for training medical practitioners requires not only that students be taught to apply ethical theory to issues and be made aware of the legal and regulatory requirements of their profession, it also expects moral formation and the inculcation of professional virtue in students. We explore whether such expectations are reasonable. We defend the (...) claim that physicians ought to be persons of virtuous character, on the grounds of the social contract between society and the profession. We further argue that since the expectations of virtue of health care professionals are reasonable, it is also sound reasoning to expect ethics teachers to try to inculcate such virtues in their students, so far as this is possible. Furthermore, this requires of such teachers that they be suitable role models of ethical practice and virtue, themselves. We claim that this applies to ethics teachers who are themselves not members of the medical profession, too, even though they are not bound by the same social contract as doctors. We conclude that those who accept employment as teachers of ethics to medical students, where as part of their contractual obligation they are expected to inculcate moral values in their students, ought to be prepared to accept their responsibility to be professionally ethical, themselves. (shrink)

The pandemic has been the most vivid agent of change that many of us have known. But it has not changed everything: plenty of the institutions, norms, and practices that sustain racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy have either weathered the storm of the crisis or been nourished by its effects. And yet enough has changed for us to see that the pandemic has profoundly recontextualised those structures and systems of violence, bringing us into a fresh negotiation with, for example, (...) the question of how we discuss and imagine freedom. Responding in part to this unexpected provocation, activist-scholars Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson forged a collaboration from the lockdown of 2020, corresponding by letter to create their forthcoming book, Rehearsals for Living, due to be published by Haymarket Books (US) and Knopf (Canada) in 2022. In this interview, we asked them to explain the epistolary form of the book and expand on the concept of “rehearsal”, before inviting them to reflect on a series of issues that animate our current crises: the politics of recognition; the notion of apocalypse; ways to disrupt linear temporalities; practises of reciprocity against proprietary logics; the gendered violence of state apparatuses; and worldbuilding as a method of resistance. In their expansive answers, Robyn and Leanne draw on their experiences as organisers and educators, commenting on anticolonial struggles, the Movement for Black Lives, and the rise of abolition discourse. Stressing the need to build a multiplicity of shared homespaces in the face of racial/colonial capitalism and organized abandonment, they challenge us to rethink the predicaments and possibilities of the present, enabling us to imagine futures liberated of extractivist, carceral governance – “planting more liberatory futures in the present”, as Robyn puts it. The task of sowing those seeds is a collective praxis of rewriting the narratives that constitute us, refusing to hear that nothing can change and insisting that everything must. (shrink)

Within relevance theory the two local pragmatic processes of enrichment and loosening of linguistically encoded conceptual material have been given quite distinct treatments. Enrichments of various sorts, including those which involve a logical strengthening of a lexical concept, contribute to the proposition expressed by the utterance, hence to its truth-conditions. Loosenings, including metaphorical uses, do not enter into the proposition expressed by the utterance or affect its truth-conditions; they stand in a relation of 'interpretive resemblance' with the linguistically encoded concept (...) used to represent them. This asymmetric treatment is questioned here, arguments are given for an account which reflects the complementarity of these processes and several alternative symmetrical treatments are explored. (shrink)

A standard view of the semantics of natural language sentences or utterances is that a sentence has a particular logical structure and is assigned truth-conditional content on the basis of that structure. Such a semantics is assumed to be able to capture the logical properties of sentences, including necessary truth, contradiction and valid inference; our knowledge of these properties is taken to be part of our semantic competence as native speakers of the language. The following examples pose a problem for (...) this view of semantics. (shrink)

_Thoughts and Utterances_ is the first sustained investigation of two distinctions which are fundamental to all theories of utterance understanding: the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly communicated and what is implicitly communicated.

Williams, Robyn I was briefly a religious person - only on a form. When we crossed into Pakistan, having hitch-hiked from London en route to Sydney in 1966, there came a point where you could not just put a line through where it said 'religion'. I suddenly discovered what to do. I wrote 'Congregationalist hedonist'. All the officials loved it. We had lots of fun together.

Proper linear models are those in which predictor variables are given weights such that the resulting linear composite optimally predicts some criterion of interest; examples of proper linear models are standard regression analysis, discriminant function analysis, and ridge regression analysis. Research summarized in P. Meehl's book on clinical vs statistical prediction and research stimulated in part by that book indicate that when a numerical criterion variable is to be predicted from numerical predictor variables, proper linear models outperform clinical intuition. Improper (...) linear models are those in which the weights of the predictor variables are obtained by some nonoptimal method. The present article presents evidence that even such improper linear models are superior to clinical intuition when predicting a numerical criterion from numerical predictors. In fact, unit weighting is quite robust for making such predictions. The application of unit weights to decide what bullet the Denver Police Department should use is described; some technical, psychological, and ethical resistances to using linear models in making social decisions are considered; and arguments that could weaken these resistances are presented. (shrink)

Medical interventions are usually categorized as “invasive” when they involve piercing the skin or inserting an object into the body. Beyond this standard definition, however, there is little discussion of the concept of invasiveness in the medical literature, despite evidence that the term is used in ways that do not reflect the standard definition of medical invasiveness. We interviewed psychiatrists, patients with depression, and members of the public without depression to better understand their views on the invasiveness of several psychiatric (...) electroceutical interventions (treatments that involve electrical or magnetic stimulation of the brain) for the treatment of depression. Our study shows that people recognize several kinds of invasiveness: physical, emotional, and lifestyle. In addition, several characteristics of therapies influence how invasive they are perceived to be; these include the perceived capacity of an intervention to result in harm; how localized the effects of the intervention are; the amount of control retained by the person receiving the intervention; how permanent its effects are perceived as being; and how familiar it seemed to participants. Our findings contribute to a small literature on the concept of invasiveness, which emphasizes that categorizing an intervention as invasive, or as noninvasive, evokes a variety of other normative considerations, including the potential harm it poses and how it compares to other potential therapies. It may also draw attention away from other salient features of the intervention. (shrink)

This study focuses on the question of individualism in the works of Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly with regard to the issue of ethical and political selfhood. If there is to be a fruitful interaction between descriptive narrative ethics and proscriptive ethical theory, the role of the literary imagination needs to be reassessed. The resurging interest in redefining the humanist project begs the question of why exponents of individual liberty and group authority remain firmly opposed to one another. Therefore (...) the analysis begins with a consideration of Sartre's failure to produce a formal system of ethics consistent with his early ontology. Sartre's account of subjectivity is framed within recent reevaluations of ethical individualism in the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel Levinas in order to demonstrate that Sartrean existentialism is ethically flawed. It is therefore argued that it is his theory of subjectivity which precludes an existentialist-Marxist alliance--the alliance itself deriving promise from a refinement of the existential position. In posing the question of whether Proust defines a theory of the self or elucidates one of an infinite number of individual paths to an authentic self-relation, I reveal that his emphasis on 'la vie interieure' is not excessive or idealistic individualism but rather ethico-political sobriety. According to Sartre, the novelist's sole purpose should be to present, without any form of edification which could translate to proselytism, the passions and actions of the characters. However, his emphasis on action neglects certain aspects of authorial intervention. When Proust's narrator, through the intricate exploration of his own self-relation, invites the reader to embark on the same journey of self-transformation, the novel becomes a site for experimental selfhood. By addressing these issues, I illuminate the difficulties Sartre faced in attempting to unite a Marxist ethos with the primacy of the individual as well as challenge Richard Rorty's characterization of Proust's literary project as a "purely private act of self-creation.". (shrink)

There is free thought, free choice, the free world – and then there is free stuff. By tracking the transformations of just one idea, "free," this book describes an arc of thought through a "revaluation of values" and offers its critique in the same gesture.

Pinjarra in 1970 lay on an extraordinary cusp. It lagged along a fault line between one order and another; or rather, it squatted at a precipice, over which its cherished values had already been dashed to pieces. In 1967, Aboriginal people were at last, by national referendum, declared citizens of Australia. In 1969, Alcoa began to prepare the site in the hills behind Pinjarra for the open-cut mining of the largest bauxite deposit so far discovered in the world. The past (...) met the future, and they didn’t recognise each other. (shrink)

Originating as a proponent of U.S. exceptionalism during the Cold War, American Studies has now reinvented itself, vigorously critiquing various kinds of critical hegemony and launching innovative interdisciplinary endeavors. _The Futures of American Studies_ considers the field today and provides important deliberations on what it might yet become. Essays by both prominent and emerging scholars provide theoretically engaging analyses of the postnational impulse of current scholarship, the field's historical relationship to social movements, the status of theory, the state of higher (...) education in the United States, and the impact of ethnic and gender studies on area studies. They also investigate the influence of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies on U.S. nationalist—and antinationalist—discourses. No single overriding paradigm dominates the anthology. Instead, the articles enter into a lively and challenging dialogue with one another. A major assessment of the state of the field, _The Futures of American Studies_ is necessary reading for American Studies scholars. _Contributors._ Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Günter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, José Estaban Muñoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to respond to a collection of conceptual and scientific threats to compatibilist accounts of free will, particularly reasons-responsive views. Compatibilists hold that free will is compatible with the truth of determinism. Some compatibilists also claim that some actual agent at least sometimes acts freely, where it is true that she acts freely in virtue of her satisfying a specific set of control and epistemic conditions. These conditions often include the possession of certain capacities, such (...) as the capacity to recognize reasons for acting and to act on the basis of those reasons. First, I address two pressing philosophical objections to the adequacy of compatibilist accounts of free will: Are reasons-responsive accounts of free will too permissive in their class of free agents? Must reasons-responsive theorists - and compatibilists more generally - concede that some agents who are manipulated or intentionally designed by others are none the less acting freely and morally responsible for their actions? I then survey a widely proposed scientific threat to compatibilist accounts of free will - and to any account of free will that requires the same basic capacities as compatibilists do: Even if the compatibilist account accurately captures the basic capacities that an agent requires to act freely, does neuroscientific work on practical decision-making and action production limit - or worse, speak against -- our actual exercise of free will, as compatibilists conceive of it? I argue that the compatibilist need not yield to these philosophical challenges to the adequacy of their accounts of free will and to their claim that some actual agents act freely, sketching plausible compatibilist-friendly reasons to doubt the potency of each challenge. Finally, I argue that the extant incompatibilist accounts of free will suffer from a previously undiagnosed, serious problem: that there is an irreconcilable tension between the way in which philosophers motivate the incompatibilist ability to do otherwise and the way in which they formally express it. I conclude by offering a diagnosis for the future of the free will debate given the arguments advanced. (shrink)

This chapter examines the control capacities of individuals with certain mental disorders and how, specifically, their reasons-responsiveness improves with treatment. Successful talk therapy, in particular, can bring individuals with disorders of agency closer to full-blown agency. The discussion focuses, first, on Agoraphobia and Exposure Therapy and, second, on Borderline Personality Disorder and Dialectical Behavior Therapy. We can see effective techniques of talk therapy, such as gradual exposure or radical acceptance exercises, as operating on the ability of patients to respond appropriately (...) to reasons. In this way, reasons-responsiveness is a lens through which both to better appreciate the flourishing of patients, via improved control in both moral and nonmoral contexts. The chapter bridges philosophical concepts of reasons-responsiveness with key psychiatric constructs, such as distress tolerance and experiential avoidance. (shrink)

Philosophy is textual - it is written and it is read - yet today much of philosophy regards itself as a kind of science, sometimes reducing itself to a species of intellectual bureaucracy. It is important to see these qualities as having their own aesthetic. Even realism is a genre. The aesthetic of the empirical and the bureaucratic, the aesthetic of the rhapsodic and of the clinical... in each of these the genres of philosophy are as creative as they ever (...) were. They are productive of worlds, not only worlds of thought, but 'real worlds' enabled by the technological and other changes that thought has envisaged. This book explores genres through the history of philosophy, providing new ways of thinking about philosophical writing. Exploring a wide range of both European and analytic philosophers and their works - including Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty - Genres of Philosophy explores the reading and writing of philosophers who themselves read and write, revealing the textual relation to the history of philosophy. While the focus of the book is in aesthetics, Ferrell reveals that the interest in philosophy's writing turns out to be a metaphysical question. The question becomes one of evaluating the ontological basis for writing - its subject and its means of expression - within a world of thought which is presently captivated by a particular aesthetic, that of the empiricist. Presenting fresh readings of classic texts in aesthetics, and offering an original approach to the question of philosophical writing, this unique analysis will prove of particular interest to readers in European philosophy, the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and literary studies. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Marion is one of the leading Catholic thinkers of our time: a formidable authority on Descartes and a major scholar in the philosophy of religion. This book presents a concise, accessible, and engaging introduction to the theology of Jean-Luc Marion. Described as one of the leading thinkers of his generation, Marion's take on the postmodern is richly enhanced by his expertise in patristic and mystical theology, phenomenology, and modern philosophy. In this first introduction to Marion's thought, Robyn Horner (...) provides the essential background to Marion's work, as well as analysing the most significant themes for contemporary theology. This book serves as an ideal starting point for students of theology and philosophy, as well as for those seeking to further their knowledge of cutting-edge thinking in contemporary theology. (shrink)

Polysemy, understood as instances of a single linguistic expression having multiple related senses, is not a homogenous phenomenon. There are regular (apparently, rule‐based) cases and irregular (resemblance‐based) cases, which have different processing profiles. Although a primary source of polysemy is pragmatic inference, at least some cases become conventionalised and linguistically encoded. Three main issues are discussed: (a) the key differences between regular and irregular cases and the role, if any, of a “core meaning”; (b) the distinction between pragmatic polysemy and (...) semantic polysemy; and (c) the role of syntactic meaning in both generating and constraining polysemy. (shrink)

I propose that an account of metaphor understanding which covers the full range of cases has to allow for two routes or modes of processing. One is a process of rapid, local, on-line concept construction that applies quite generally to the recovery of word meaning in utterance comprehension. The other requires a greater focus on the literal meaning of sentences or texts, which is metarepresented as a whole and subjected to more global, reflective pragmatic inference. The questions whether metaphors convey (...) a propositional content and what role imagistic representation plays receive somewhat different answers depending on the processing route. (shrink)

Hegel's "highway of despair," introduced in his _Phenomenology of Spirit_, represents the tortured path traveled by "natural consciousness" on its way to freedom. Despair, the passionate residue of Hegelian critique, also indicates fugitive opportunities for freedom and preserves the principle of hope against all hope. Analyzing the works of an eclectic cast of thinkers, Robyn Marasco considers the dynamism of despair as a critical passion, reckoning with the forms of historical life forged along Hegel's highway. _The Highway of Despair_ (...) follows Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, and Frantz Fanon as they each read, resist, and reconfigure a strand of thought in Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit_. Confronting the twentieth-century collapse of a certain revolutionary dialectic, these thinkers struggle to revalue critical philosophy and recast Left Hegelianism within the contexts of genocidal racism, world war, and colonial domination. Each thinker also re-centers the role of passion in critique. Arguing against more recent trends in critical theory that promise an escape from despair, Marasco shows how passion frustrates the resolutions of reason and faith. Embracing the extremism of what Marx, in the spirit of Hegel, called the "ruthless critique of everything existing," she affirms the contemporary purchase of radical critical theory, resulting in a passionate approach to political thought. (shrink)

Amoral actions are actions outside of the moral domain. To establish a way of understanding amoral actions, I will draw upon Dale Dorsey’s agency view which, in sum, maintains that an agent must have a reason to perform an action and be able to perform the action in question based upon that reason. Dorsey focuses upon both cognitive and circumstantial limitations to establish the fact that moral agents can (and do) perform amoral actions. In this paper, however, I will focus (...) upon a kind of deficiency of knowledge that is imparted socially. Some actions of persons suffering from autism seem to fall into the category of amoral actions that I have in mind but, so too, would some actions of persons who suffer from a moral injury. In sum, I aim to expand upon the category of amoral actions among moral agents. (shrink)

After reviewing factors implicated in the generation of delusional beliefs, we conclude that whilst a perceptual aberration coupled with a particular type of attri‐butional bias may be necessary to explain the specific thematic content of a bizarre delusion, neither of these factors, whether in isolation or in combination, is sufficient to explain the presence of delusional beliefs. In contrast to bias models (theories which explain delusion formation in terms of extremes of normal reasoning biases), we advocate a deficit model of (...) delusion formation–that is, delusions arise when the normal cognitive system which people use to generate, evaluate, and then adopt beliefs is damaged. Mere bias we think inadequate to explain bizarre delusions which defy commonsense and persist despite overwhelming rational counter‐argument. In particular, we propose that two deficits must be present in the normal cognitive system to explain bizarre delusions: (1) there must be some damage to sensory and/or attentional‐orient‐ing mechanisms which causes an aberrant perception–this explains the bizarre content of the causal hypothesis generated to explain what is happening; and (2) there must also be a failure of normal belief evaluation–this explains why a hypothesis, implausible in the light of general commonsense, is adopted as belief. This latter deficit occurs, we suggest, when an individual is incapable of suspending the natural favoured status of direct first‐person evidence in order to critically evaluate hypotheses, given equal pri‐ority whether based on direct or indirect sources of information. In contrast, delusions with ‘ordinary’ content may arise when a single deficit of normal belief evaluation occurs in the context of an extreme (but normal) attentional bias, thus causing failure to critically evaluate hypotheses based on misperceptions and misintrepretations of ambiguous (but ordinary) first‐person experience. (shrink)

The first volume in the rapidly growing field of philosophy of medicine to focus on the relationship between knowledge and clinical practice and policy.

Belief and credal commitment sometimes seem to make less and less sense in the West. A kind of 'cultural amnesia' has taken hold, where formal religious adherence begins to seem almost unthinkable. This is especially so for the idea of divine revelation. Robyn Horner argues this means we need to re-evaluate how theology proceeds, focusing not so much on beliefs but on experience. Exploring ways in which the experiential might open human beings up to divine possibility, the author turns (...) to phenomenology because it seeks to examine unrestrictedly what is given through involved encounter. Bringing phenomenology and poststructuralism together, Horner develops the idea of revelation as an 'event' wherein God interrupts and exceeds human experience, affecting and transforming it. This striking concept, named but largely unexplored by theology, articulates a notion of supernatural revelation which now starts to appear both coherent and plausible. (shrink)

Empirical research in bioethics has developed rapidly over the past decade, but has largely eschewed the use of technology-driven methodologies. We propose “design bioethics” as an area of conjoined theoretical and methodological innovation in the field, working across bioethics, health sciences and human-centred technological design. We demonstrate the potential of digital tools, particularly purpose-built digital games, to align with theoretical frameworks in bioethics for empirical research, integrating context, narrative and embodiment in moral decision-making. Purpose-built digital tools can engender situated engagement (...) with bioethical questions; can achieve such engagement at scale; and can access groups traditionally under-represented in bioethics research and theory. If developed and used with appropriate rigor, tools motivated by “design bioethics” could offer unique insights into new and familiar normative and empirical issues in the field. (shrink)

"At once rigorous, insightful, and accessible.... the most thorough study yet available on the phenomenological treatment of God as gift in Marion and Derrida. Invaluable reading for those concerned with the theological promise of contemporary Continental philosophy."-Thomas A. Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara.

24 women including E. Feal and B. Sykes describe their alignment with womens movement; Both argue that sexism runs second to racism as oppressive agent of black women, womens movement doesnt address their problems.

In Free Will and Luck, Mele presents a case of an agent Ernie, whose zygote was intentionally designed so that Ernie A-s in 30 years, bringing about a certain event E. Mele uses this case of original design to outline the zygote argument against compatibilism. In this paper I criticize the zygote argument. Unlike other compatibilists who have responded to the zygote argument, I contend that it is open to the compatibilist to accept premise one, that Ernie does not act (...) freely and is not morally responsible for anything he does. I argue that compatibilists should deny premise two. Diana’s effective intention to create Ernie’s zygote such that Ernie A-s in 30 years and her intervention to bring about his A-ing mark a significant difference between Ernie and normal agents in a deterministic universe with regard to how their zygotes were created that affects whether those agents act freely and are morally responsible for so acting. (shrink)

This book provides pre-service and practising teachers with an integrated approach to language and literacy learning in early childhood. Written by leading academics in the field, it explores how children learn to talk, play using language, become literate and make meaning - from birth through to the pre-school years. Emphasising the importance of imagination and the arts in language learning, this book addresses a wide range of contemporary issues, highlights the impact of diverse socioeconomic, language and cultural backgrounds on young (...) children's language and literacy development, and shows how early childhood teachers can effectively partner with parents and caregivers to help children learn through and about language. Case studies, interviews, reflective questions, clear links to the Early Years Learning Framework and the Australian Curriculum, and a rich array of practical and creative activities for use in early childhood environments help students connect theory and current research to practice. (shrink)

Drawing on 38 in-depth, qualitative interviews, this article explores how people working in the equality sector in England and Wales view and use the current law around sex and gender, and how they imagine law’s future, particularly potential decertification, where the state would withdraw from certifying and regulating a person’s sex/gender. Whilst situated in the bureaucratic strand of the literature, the paper also contributes to wider legal consciousness studies. This literature has generally focused on people’s relationships to law in terms (...) of domination, alienation and game-playing. Drawing on idioms and the language of touch, the paper unpacks the way in which equality actors talked about law not as remote or alienating, but as close and familiar; not as oppressive, but as “precious” and hard-won. Some also regarded law as a place of safety in unsafe times. These proposed ‘attached to law’ and ‘protective of law’ strands of consciousness enrich and extend Ewick and Silbey’s classic ‘before the law’ narrative. The findings are also useful for critical legal and feminist scholarship. Combined with the equality sector’s pragmatic and tactical use of law to problem-solve, this close and protective orientation towards law reproduces its hegemony. The paper concludes by exploring a recurrent refrain that, in relation to decertification, “we’re not there yet” and that gender equality would need to be achieved before decertification would “fly”. (shrink)

If an agent lacks the ability to exercise deliberative agency or moral agency, or otherwise does not believe themselves to have a choice with respect to an action, then that action is amoral. Robyn Gaier argues that actions of suicide are amoral in at least these ways.

The purpose of this research was to explore the concept of collaboration within a specific healthcare context and to include the perspectives of healthcare users, a position largely lacking in previous studies. In applying a critical theoretical approach, the focus was on, as an exemplar, mothers with newborn babies who had spent more than 48 hr in a special care nursery. Semistructured interviews were undertaken with child health nurses, midwives and mothers. The three key theoretical findings on collaboration generated in (...) the study point to layers of meanings around identity, knowledge and institutions of care. Findings from the interview data analysis were further examined through the lens of key policy documents. The research outcomes indicate that the concept of collaboration serves an important function in healthcare in obscuring the complexities and ambiguities that characterise the care continuum. The study concludes the need for a more critical approach to the assumptions that underlie the language of collaboration and the implications for practice in healthcare. (shrink)