In order to reach a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics in violent situations in institutional care for elderly people the aim of this study was to explore involved parties’ positions, and to illuminate forces and moves related to these positions. One involved care provider's narrative was analysed using narrative analysis and positioning theory. In the narrative the involved parties’ positions were fluid and often overlapping, and not exclusively as victim or perpetrator. Across the narrative the narrator altered the involved (...) parties’ positions by using available discourses. We understand that the altered positions were a salient way for the care provider to make sense of her experiences. By reading the care provider's narrative we further understand that she was much more than just a perpetrator, which was the origin for her narrative. This study led us to two assumptions important for implications in nursing practice. First, it is of significance how we position ourselves and others in narratives and conversations. Second, there is a difference between being categorised in advance and getting the opportunity to narrate one's own story. (shrink)

This paper discusses whether it can be known a priori that a particular term, such as water, is a natural kind term, and how this problem relates to Putnams claim that natural kind terms require an externalist semantics. Two conceptions of natural kind terms are contrasted: The first holds that whether water is a natural kind term depends on its a priori knowable semantic features. The second.

Sarah Sawyer has challenged my claim that social externalism depends on the assumption that individuals have an incomplete grasp of their own concepts. Sawyer denies that Burge's later sofa thought-experiment relies on this assumption: the unifying principle behind the thought-experiments supporting social externalism, she argues, is just that referents play a role in the individuation of concepts. I argue that Sawyer fails to show that social externalism need not rely on the assumption of incomplete understanding. To establish the content externalist (...) conclusions, further considerations are required, and these do commit the externalist to the assumption of incomplete understanding. (shrink)

My paper examines the popular idea, defended by Kripke, that meaning is an essentially normative notion. I consider four common versions of this idea and suggest that none of them can be supported, either because the alleged normativity has nothing to do with normativity or because it cannot plausibly be said that meaning is normative in the sense suggested. I argue that contrary to received opinion, we don’t need normativity to secure the possibility of meaning. I conclude by considering the (...) repercussions of rejecting semantic normativity on three central issues: justification, communication, and naturalism. (shrink)

Background: The occurrence of behavioural changes and problems, and degree of paranoid thoughts, are significantly higher among people who have experienced extreme trauma such as during the Holocaust. People with dementia and traumatic past experiences may have flashbacks reminding them of these experiences, which is of relevance in caring situations. In nursing homes for people with dementia, nursing assistants are often the group of staff who provide help with personal needs. They have firsthand experience of care and managing the devastating (...) outcomes of inadequate understanding of a person’s past experiences. Aim: The aim was to describe nursing assistants’ experiences of caring for older people with dementia who have experienced Holocaust trauma. Research design: A qualitative descriptive and inductive approach was used, including qualitative interviews and content analysis. Participants and research context: Nine nursing assistants from a Jewish nursing home were interviewed. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the Regional Ethical Review Board, Stockholm. Findings: The theme ‘Adapting and following the survivors’ expression of their situation’ was built on two categories: Knowing the life story enables adjustments in the care and Need for flexibility in managing emotional expressions. Discussion and conclusion: The world still witnesses genocidal violence and such traumatic experiences will therefore be reflected in different ways when caring for survivors with dementia in the future. Person-centred care and an awareness of the meaning of being a survivor of severe trauma make it possible to avoid negative triggers, and confirm emotions and comfort people during negative flashbacks in caring situations and environments. Nursing assistants’ patience and empathy were supported by a wider understanding of the behaviour of people with dementia who have survived trauma. (shrink)

In the book Gibbard proposes, first, that statements about meaning are normative statements and, second, that they can be given an expressivist treatment, along the lines of Gibbard’s preferred metaethics. In my paper, I examine the first step: The claim that meaning statements are to be construed as being normative, as involving ‘oughts’. Gibbard distinguishes two versions of the normativity of meaning thesis – a weak version, according to which every means implies an ought, and a strong version, according to (...) which for every means, there is an ought that implies it. I argue that neither thesis withstands scrutiny. The weak thesis depends on assumptions about the notion of semantic correctness that the anti-normativist rejects, and the strong thesis does not solve the problems Gibbard wants it to solve: the problems of indeterminacy and meaning skepticism. I conclude that semantics does not need normativity. (shrink)

Externalism is widely endorsed within contemporary philosophy of mind and language. Despite this, it is far from clear how the externalist thesis should be construed and, indeed, why we should accept it. In this entry I distinguish and examine three central types of externalism: what I call foundational externalism, externalist semantics, and psychological externalism. I suggest that the most plausible version of externalism is not in fact a very radical thesis and does not have any terribly interesting implications for philosophy (...) of mind, whereas the more radical and interesting versions of externalism are quite difficult to support. (shrink)

The paper discusses the thesis of extended belief and its implications for the possibility of extending ordinary, personal level knowledge. A common worry is that knowledge will overextend, that there will be ‘cognitive bloat’. If the subject’s standing beliefs can be realized in devices such as notebooks and smart phones, what is there to prevent the conclusion that she knows everything stored on such devices? One response to this worry is to block the move from belief to knowledge, and argue (...) that these externally stored beliefs, although reliable, do not qualify as knowledge. I argue, instead, that the fundamental problem arises at the level of belief. We prevent bloating of knowledge by preventing the bloating of belief. To do so, I argue, we need to take seriously Clark and Chalmers’ suggestion that what is distinctive of belief is its role in folk psychological explanations. Paying attention to this role shows that the usual examples, such as Otto’s notebook information, do not qualify as beliefs. To qualify, the external information would have to be much more directly connected to, and deeply integrated into, the subject’s overall system of beliefs and desires. (shrink)

To gain legitimacy for climate change adaptation decisions, the distribution of responsibility for these decisions and their implementation needs to be grounded in theories of just distribution and what those a ected by decisions see as just. The purpose of this project is to contribute to sustainable spatial planning and the ability of local and regional public authorities to make well-informed and sustainable adaptation decisions, based on knowledge about both climate change impacts and the perceptions of residents and civil servants (...) on what constitutes a sustainable distribution of responsibility. Our aims are: (1) a better understanding of the practical implications of theories about just distribution of responsibility for the choice of local and regional climate adaptation measures; (2) knowledge about what residents and civil servants consider a sustainable distribution of responsibility for climate adaptation measures; and (3) a better understanding of conflicts concerning the distribution of responsibilities and systematic knowledge about the possibilities to manage them. In this interdisciplinary project, we study six municipalities and their residents, and two county administrative boards, all in Sweden, using mixed methods: value theory, document studies, interviews, focus groups, and surveys. (shrink)

Abstract:Hume’s theory of pride has been dismissed due to the contingent relation between passion and object. But why did Hume state the theory as he did? Why did he give two accounts of pride, one holistic and one atomistic? This paper considers Hume’s reasons for giving two accounts, and how he unified them. The holistic account enables Hume to explain how moral distinctions are made, whereas the atomistic allows him to anchor morality in human nature. The accounts are unified by (...) the distinction of feeling pride and being proud: a steady passion of pride would not count as that if it did not contain feelings of pride identified by their introspective quality, and would not be a state of pride without the causal relation of ideas. (shrink)

With this treatise, Mahan attempts to do justice to the subject of moral philosophy and, therefore, challenge the student who tries to fathom the depths and ascend the heights of thought.

Through these books, scholars, interpreters, students, and non-academics alike can see the thoughts and beliefs of Americans who came before us.".

This article discusses the thesis that a subject can have a concept, think thoughts containing it, that she incompletely understands. The central question concerns how to construe the distinction between having a concept and understanding it. Two important versions of the thesis are distinguished: a metasemantic version and an epistemic version. According to the first, the subject may have concept C without being a fully competent user, in virtue of deference to other speakers or to the world. According to the (...) second, the subject may have a concept without being able to provide a proper explication of it. It is argued that whereas the epistemic version is plausible, the metasemantic version faces some challenges. First, it needs to be explained precisely how deference enables a speaker to have C. Second, metasemantic incomplete understanding is in tension with the idea that concepts serve to capture the subject’s cognitive perspective. (shrink)

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyOpening this book the philosopher might expect a treatise on self‐knowledge. However, despite its title, this is not a book on knowledge of our own minds, or even on self‐consciousness in the usual sense of being conscious of oneself. Rather, it is a book on developmental psychology, spelling out the fascinating details of the development of the human mind with a particular focus on the emergence of human consciousness. The question Radu J. Bogdan (...) raises is why, and how, consciousness develops in human beings. His central hypothesis is that consciousness is a bi‐product of the executive abilities that a small child develops in response to the complex socio‐cultural situation that she finds herself in. The executive abilities, Bogden argues, are assembled by the child's intuitive psychology, or theory of mind, which allows her to interact and coregulate with others. The origins of... (shrink)

We start by showing how to approximate unitary and bounded self-adjoint operators by operators in finite dimensional spaces. Using ultraproducts we give a precise meaning for the approximation. In this process we see how the spectral measure is obtained as an ultralimit of counting measures that arise naturally from the finite dimensional approximations. Then we see how generalized distributions can be interpreted in the ultraproduct. Finally we study how one can calculate kernels of operators K by calculating them in the (...) finite dimensional approximations and how one needs to interpret Dirac deltas in the ultraproduct in order to get the kernels as propagators $\langle x_{1}|K|x_{0}\rangle $. (shrink)

This contradiction ”1. The universal right to free speech did not exist before the European Enlightenment, at which time it came into existence. 2. The universal right to free speech has always existed, but this right was recognized only at the time of the European Enlightenment.” draws on two common and conflicting intuitions: The human right to free speech exists because institutions, or the law, says so. In contrast, the human right to free speech can exist independently of institutions—these institutions (...) simply recognize a right we already have. John Searle argues that his status function account of human rights can preserve both intuitions by showing that the inconsistency between and is merely apparent. I argue that this solution works for tokens of human rights but not for types, while the contradiction concerns types. Hence, the status function account of human rights fails to preserve both intuitions. (shrink)

Within the research field of computer-mediated communication, extensive attention has been paid to the differences between CMC and spoken conversation, particularly in terms of sequential structure. In this study, the aim is to analyse how participants maintain continuity and handle discontinuities in institutionally arranged, computer-mediated communication. The empirical material consists of chat log files from in-service training courses for professionals in the food production industry. In the chat sessions we analysed, participants initially had some problems in co-ordinating their postings, that (...) is, keeping track of the discussion’s threading.We also found, however, that methods for co-ordinating postings rather quickly were established among the participants. Two methods for making recognizable how postings were to be read were common in the material: 1) the use of personal names to address a specific participant, and 2) recycling part of the content of a previous posting or reformulating the content in the posting addressed in recognizable ways. We also found an emerging norm in their interaction: that of waiting for one’s turn. (shrink)

Background: In end of life care, ethical problems often come to the fore. Little research is performed on ways or strategies for handling those problems and even less on obstacles to and possibilities of using such strategies. A previous study illuminated stroke team members’ experiences of ethical problems and how the teams managed the situation when caring for patients faced with sudden and unexpected death from stroke. These findings have been further explored in this study. Objective: The aim of the (...) study was to illuminate obstacles and possibilities perceived by stroke team members in using strategies for handling ethical problems when caring for patients afflicted by sudden and unexpected death caused by stroke. Research design: A qualitative method with combined deductive and inductive content analysis was utilized. Participants and research context: Data were collected through individual interviews with 15 stroke team members working in stroke units of two associated county hospitals in western Sweden. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the Regional Ethics Review Board, Gothenburg, Sweden. Permission was also obtained from the director of each stroke unit. Findings: All the studied strategies for handling of ethical problems were found to have both obstacles and possibilities. Uncertainty is shown as a major obstacle and unanimity as a possibility in the use of the strategies. The findings also illuminate the value of the concept “the patient’s best interests” as a starting point for the carers’ ethical reasoning. Conclusion: The concept “the patient’s best interests” used as a starting point for ethical reasoning among the carers is not explicitly defined yet, which might make this value difficult to use both as a universal concept and as an argument for decisions. Carers therefore need to strengthen their argumentation and reflect on and use ethically grounded arguments and defined ethical values like dignity in their clinical work and decisions. (shrink)

Ever since Putnam and Burge launched their respective attacks on individualist accounts of meaning the individualist has felt squeezed for space.1 Very little maneuvering room, it seems, is left for the philosopher who wants to deny that meaning and mental content depend on the speaker's social environment. One option, popular amongst individualists, is to grant that reference is socially determined but argue that there is nevertheless a notion of meaning or content that can be understood individualistically. That is, the individualist (...) can opt for a. (shrink)

When people die suddenly and unexpectedly ethical issues often come to the fore. The aim of the study was to describe experiences of members of stroke teams in stroke units of ethical problems and how the teams manage the situation when caring for patients faced with sudden and unexpected death from stroke. Data were collected through four focus group interviews with 19 team members in stroke-unit teams, and analysed using interpretive content analysis. Three themes emerged from the analysis characterized by (...) information, decisions about care and support for the next-of-kin in the changing and uncertain situation, with mutual trust as the core. Mutual trust, both within the stroke team and with next-of-kin was seen by the stroke-team members as a way of handling ethical problems by administering care with the patient’s best interest at heart. (shrink)

The question of whether content externalism poses a threat to the traditional view of self-knowledge has been much debated. Compatibilists have tried to diffuse the threat by appealing to the self-verifying character of reflexive judgments about our own thoughts, while incompatibilists have strenuously objected that this does not suffice. In my paper I argue that this debate is fundamentally misconceived since it is based, on both sides, on the problematic notion of ‘knowledge of content’. What this shows, I argue, is (...) not that content externalism is unobjectionable, but that the real challenge to content externalism is not an epistemological one. The real difficulty concerns the content externalist’s seemingly necessary commitment to the idea that individuals have an incomplete grasp of the concepts that go into their own thoughts. This idea poses a threat not to self-knowledge, I argue, but rather to our first- and second-order reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Crick and Koch’s 1990 “neurobiological theory of consciousness” sparked the race for the physical correlates of subjective experience. 30 years later, cognitive sciences trend toward consideration of the brain’s electromagnetic field as the primary seat of consciousness, the “to be” of the individual. Recent advancements in laboratory tools have preceded an influx of studies reporting a synchronization between the neuronally generated EM fields of interacting individuals. An embodied and enactive neuroscientific approach has gained traction in the wake of these findings (...) wherein consciousness and cognition are theorized to be regulated and distributed beyond the individual. We approach this frontier to extend the implications of person-to-person synchrony to propose a process of combination whereby coupled individual agents merge into a hierarchical cognitive system to which they are subsidiary. Such is to say, the complex mammalian consciousness humans possess may not be the tip of the iceberg, but another step in a succeeding staircase. To this end, the axioms and conjectures of General Resonance Theory are utilized to describe this phenomenon of interpersonal resonant combination. Our proposal describes a coupled system of spatially distributed EM fields that are synchronized through recurrent, entraining behavioral interactions. The system, having achieved sufficient synchronization, enjoys an optimization of information flow that alters the conscious states of its merging agents and enhances group performance capabilities. In the race for the neurobiological correlates of subjective experience, we attempt the first steps in the journey toward defining the physical basis of “group consciousness.” The establishment of a concrete account of the combination of consciousness at a scale superseding individual human consciousness remains speculation, but our suggested approach provides a framework for empirical testing of these possibilities. (shrink)

Commentary and summarization of the selected works of Yaḥyá ibn Ḥabash Suhrawardī, 1152 or 1153-1191.

Volume: v. 1 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1824 Original Publisher: Printed at the Mirror Office Subjects: Philosophy / Ethics.

Standing on the shoulders of thinkers who have sought carefully to delineate proper behaviour in armed conflict—not least to distinguish just from illegitimate wars—military ethics is a subdiscipline enjoying renewed interest and, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, increasing practical relevance. It is particularly vibrant and expansive at the moment due to the emergence of novel forms of military activity. Whereas classical warfare involved a near symmetrical encounter between opposing forces, present-day asymmetric conflicts (such as fighting terrorists and insurgents) (...) and other military challenges (such as humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping) raise especially difficult—and often dizzying—ethical issues. As research in and around the area flourishes as never before, this new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Philosophy, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature. It is a four-volume collection of the best and most influential canonical and cutting-edge research. The first volume (‘Traditions’) assembles the key work on the history of military ethics from a variety of traditions. The second volume collects the most important thinking on the crucial doctrine of a ‘just war’. Volume III (‘New Military Activities’), meanwhile, brings together the best research on topics such humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping, fighting terrorism, and counterinsurgency. The scholarship assembled in the final volume (‘Issues’) focuses on the contentions around military values and virtues. It also collects the best work on the ethcis of dealing with extreme emergencies, deterrence, and torture. With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the material in its historical and intellectual context, Military Ethics is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research resource. (shrink)