This book evaluates a range of contemporary social and political questions in light of Catholic social teaching, philosophy, great political thinkers, and America's founding tradition. It is a strong and focused defense of traditional Catholic approaches to the questions of our time, and the vast array of material covered makes this book an invaluable reference for anyone interested in contemporary politics.

Describes the rescue efforts involved in saving the lives of animals affected by a tornado.

Ernest Sosa has recently argued that the knowledge we get from instruments and the knowledge we get from testimony is similar in important ways. Most importantly, the justification that supports it is similar in kind – both instrumental justification and justification from testimony is to be understood in terms of reliability. I argue that Sosa’s theory is problematic. Specifically, I argue that we can take certain attitudes towards people that we cannot coherently take towards instruments. This, I argue, grounds a (...) distinction between the kind of justification that testimony can make available and the kind of justification that instruments can make available. The result is that reliability cannot provide a complete explanation of the justification that testimony makes available. (shrink)

This essay examines Darwin's positiva use of theology in the first edition of the Origin of Species in three steps. First, the essay analyses the Origin's theological language about God's accessibility, honesty, methods of creating, relationship to natural laws and lack of responsibility for natural suffering; the essay contends that Darwin utilized positiva theology in order to help justify descent with modification and to attack special creation. Second, the essay offers critical analysis of this theology, drawing in part on Darwin's (...) mature ruminations to suggest that, from an epistemic point of view, the Origin's positiva theology manifests several internal tensions. Finally, the essay reflects on the relative epistemic importance of positiva theology in the Origin's overall case for evolution. The essay concludes that this theology served as a handmaiden and accomplice to Darwin's science. (shrink)

The Fiction of Postmodernity is a significant and accessible new study of the relation of postmodern fiction to theories of the postmodern. Contemporary works of fiction by novelists such as Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon and Martin Amis are viewed in relation to critiques of the 'culture industry', analyses of the 'postmodern condition' and theories of simulacra. The work of influential theorists of the postmodern - such as Theodor Adorno, Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard - (...) is explained and compared.The book offers descriptions of the postmodern from both the Marxist critical tradition and from the perspective of postmarxism. Key features in both these definitions are explained in relation to modernist and postmodern works of fiction. Issues relating to the postmodern representation of history and the development of a postmodern politics are also addressed in relation to works of contemporary fiction.Key Features*Substantial readings of fiction by major contemporary authors (e.g. Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo)*Introduces influential theories of the postmodern (Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard)*Analysis of the relationships of modernism and the avant-garde to postmodernism*Focuses on the critical potential of postmodernism and postmodern fiction. (shrink)

Patient-centered care is now recognized as a clinical method and ideal model for patient – health professional relationships, and many definitions have influenced its evolution. Overall the patient-centered care literature has provided relatively little to define patient-centered care at the level of the patient-professional relationship. Additionally, patient-centered care lacks grounding in ethical theory. This thesis asserts that theoretical concepts from the ethics of care can provide a stronger conceptual basis for patient-centered care.This thesis begins with a critical interpretive review of (...) the patient-centered care literature, yielding 12 articles that previously introduced new theoretical and definitional work on patient-centered care and patient-centered communication. Six common themes and ideas were discovered, and include Engaging the Patient as a Whole Person, Recognizing and Responding to Emotions, Fostering a Therapeutic Alliance, Promoting an Exchange of Information, Sharing Decision Making, and Enabling Self-Management and Patient Navigation. These elements were then compared to key elements of the ethics of care. This thesis argues that feminists have good reason to consider care as a type of moral duty, and it describes how this duty functions. This thesis also argues that a duty to care is triggered when caregivers are presented with particular substantive forms of vulnerability. Specifically, this thesis argues that vulnerable subjects whose constitutive needs are at risk require particular moral obligations. The links between the ethics of care and patient-centered care are discussed, including how an ethics of care response ought to function in the health care context. Finally, the cases of J.J. and Makayla Sault, two aboriginal girls who refused chemotherapy in favour of traditional aboriginal healing practices, are analyzed. This thesis offers a short scoping review of the bioethics discourse surrounding these cases. A review of this discourse revealed several common themes, which included the peripheral importance of culture and history, the equating of best interests with survival, the supremacy of science-based medicine, and the impartial application of ethical principles. This thesis recommends that health care professionals apply an ethics of care approach to similar ethical dilemmas in the future, which involves shifting one's ethical focus to the central relationships of the case, understanding the unique perspective of the patient's narrative, and promoting a care-based rather than a justice-based approach to problem-solving. (shrink)

The Genre Legong is a secular (balih-balihan) Balinese dance genre (Anon. 1971).[1] Though originally associated with the palace,[2] legong has long been performed in villages, especially at temple ceremonies, as well as at Balinese festivals of the arts. Since the 1920s, abridged versions of legong dances have featured in concerts organized for tourists and in overseas tours by Balinese orchestras. Indeed, the dance has become culturally emblematic, and its image is used to advertise Bali to the world. Traditionally, the dancers (...) are three young girls; the servant (condong), who dances a prelude, and two legong. All wear elaborate costumes of gilded cloth with ornate accessories and frangipani-crowned headdresses.[3] The core repertoire consists of about fifteen dances (some of which are now lost), ranging in their longest versions from thirty to sixty minutes. Some of these are narrative, while others are abstract or general representations of nature, birds, insects, or plants. Those that involve narratives are, nevertheless, highly stylized, and the presentation of the drama is always secondary to the beauty of the dance. The genre is regarded as a treasury of the movements for Balinese women’s dance, and no dancer’s training is complete if she lacks a solid grounding in legong. The dance is accompanied by a gamelan of twenty-five or more players.[4] Though the legong dance remains popular in areas of traditional strength, and despite efforts to revive it, it is generally in decline (Davies 2006). (shrink)

Sulla base del ms. Vat. Borg. 39 viene edita la quaestio I del Quodlibet IV. Nell'introduzione l'A. ricorda le posizioni espresse da Enrico di Gand, Duns Scoto, Gerardo da Bologna e Erveo Natale sul tema in questione. La posizione di Guido sull'analogia dell'essere, per quanto originale, si costituisce come una valida alternativa alla opinio communis rappresentata da Gerardo da Bologna, Erveo Natale e da molti altri autori attivi tra la fine del XIII sec. e gli inizi del XIV.

I defend the idea that the fact that no system is entirely isolated can be used to explain the successful use of the microcanonical distribution in statistical mechanics. The argument turns on claims about what is needed for an adequate explanation of this fact: I argue in particular that various competing explanations do not meet reasonable conditions of adequacy, and that the most striking lacuna in Interventionism – its failure to explain the ‘arrow of time’ – is no real defect.

Marshalling psychological and sociological theory and research, and drawing upon extensive clinical experiences as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, the author explores the various dimensions of cloning. Clone Being attempts to anticipate possible consequences for a clone, his or her 'parents' and family, and society.

1. IntroductionIt is an increasingly accepted protocol to situate oneself discursively in order to approach a set of problems. This protocol, consolidated by Donna Haraway’s famous “situated knowledge,” is also evident in everyday Indigenous Australian practice.1 I begin, therefore, with my long association with the Goolarabooloo community in Broome, North-West Australia, and in particular with Paddy Roe, who started teaching me in the late 1970s. This text attempts to translate his sense of belonging to that territory, an attachment he had (...) to struggle to maintain, both in the face of ongoing destructive colonization and also in the face of other Aboriginal territorial claims. These collective attachments are therefore inflected by history—not just settler history, but Indigenous history that has changed in relation to colonization. These changes are wrought through overwhelmingly rapid material changes, shifting institutional alliances, contested concepts, and new practices. This ethnographic history is an attempt to provide an overview of some of these changes in the North-West corner of Australia over the last forty years. (shrink)

This article argues that the concept of translation is central to the work of Bruno Latour, starting before ANT, with the group working on the sociologie de la traduction at the École des Mines. As one of his translators, I reflect on the extension of his identity via translation, then on the idea of translation as ‘political labour’ across social discontinuities, including those in colonisation contexts where certain languages can become hegemonic. Finally, with Latour’s major project, the Inquiry into Modes (...) of Existence, translation continues its descriptive task, but carries so much weight over the various modes of existence that it qualifies as a key philosophical concept of considerable analytic value. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the distortion of concepts involved in davidson's identification of linguistic understanding with interpretation. It suggests that the motivation for this distortion lies in davidson's commitment to a quinean metaphysics, In which human beings encounter bare sounds and bodily movements rather than words and actions. The affinities between this picture and that of empiricism are briefly adumbrated.

(1995). Re-Monstrations: Heidegger, Derrida and Wittgenstein's Hand. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 26, Lacan, Adorno, and Bataille, pp. 65-85.

Bosnian translation of "How 'Chinese' Was Kant?" (abridged version).

Now let us imagine, if you please, a tiny worm living in the blood, . . . . The worm would be living in the blood as we are living in our part of the universe, and it would regard each individual particle as a whole, not a part, and it would have no idea as to how all the parts are controlled by the overall nature of the blood and compelled to mutual adaptation as the overall nature of the (...) blood requires, so as to agree with one another in a definite relation. . . .Now all the bodies of Nature can and should be conceived in the same way as we have here conceived the blood; . . . . Now since the nature of the universe, unlike the nature of the blood, is not limited, but is absolutely infinite, its parts are modified by the nature of this infinite in infinite ways and are compelled to undergo infinite variations. (Spinoza, ESL, Letter 32, 245–6). (shrink)

Ethics, as basic to liberal education, is often overly abstracted in philosophy departments, laboring under an unexamined assumption that ethics consists in construction and application of the one best theory. In professionally oriented programs it often becomes relativistic or merely procedural. Centered on the essentially ineffable quality of good or right action, this essay offers a suggestion as to the design and pedagogy of an interdisciplinary ethics course suited to the global age. Components include: consideration of the alternative positions on (...) cases; ongoing inquiry into the nature of good action; examination of the philosophical perspectives which inform positions people take in particular cases/situations; experience of dialogue/deliberation, as the practice through which we can cultivate ever expanded ethical awareness; and appreciative recognition of ethical maturity as it is articulated in the great traditions, for example, as practical wisdom or “action of non-action”. (shrink)