The notion of home is well known from our everyday experience, and plays a crucial role in all kinds of narratives about human life, but is hardly ever systematically dealt with in the philosophy of medicine and health care. This paper is based upon the intuitively positive connotation of the term “home.” By metaphorically describing the goal of palliative care as “the patient’s coming home,” it wants to contribute to a medical humanities approach of medicine. It is argued that this (...) metaphor can enrich our understanding of the goals of palliative care and its proper objectives. Four interpretations of “home” and “coming home” are explored: (1) one’s own house or homelike environment, (2) one’s own body, (3) the psychosocial environment, and (4) the spiritual dimension, in particular, the origin of human existence. Thinking in terms of coming home implies a normative point of view. It represents central human values and refers not only to the medical-technical and care aspects of health care, but also to the moral context. (shrink)

This essay defends a strong right against displacement as part of a basic individual right to secure access to one’s home. The analysis is purposefully situated within the difficult context of climate change adaptation policies. Under increasing environmental pressures, especially regarding water security, there are weighty reasons motivating the forced displacement of persons—to safeguard water resources or prevent water-related disasters. Even in these pressing circumstances, I argue, individuals have weighty rights to secure access to their homes. I explain how the (...) home provides a functional context for conditions of autonomous agency. Being coerced from the home disrupts and subverts the conditions necessary for autonomous processes. I conclude by suggesting that the right to the home could be a foundational element of territorial rights. (shrink)

The author argues that behind the apparent randomness of interactions between cabdrivers and their fares in Warsaw is a temporal structure. To capture this temporal structure, the author introduces the notion of a linking ecology. He argues that the Warsaw taxi market is a linking ecology, which is structured by religious time, state time, and family time. The author then focuses on waiting time, arguing that it too structures the interactions between cabdrivers and their fares. The author makes a processual (...) argument that waiting time has been restructured by the postsocialist transformation, but only because this transformation has been continually encoded through the defensive and adaptive strategies of cabdrivers responding to the repetitive and unique events located across the social space. The author concludes with the claim that linking ecologies are a recurring structure of the social process and that they form the backbone of globalization, financialization, and mediatization. (shrink)