This paper explores how the diagnosis of mental disorder may affect the diagnosed subject’s self-concept by supplying an account that emphasizes the influence of autobiographical and social narratives on self-understanding. It focuses primarily on the diagnoses made according to the criteria provided by the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and suggests that the DSM diagnosis may function as a source of narrative that affects the subject’s self-concept. Engaging in this analysis by appealing to autobiographies and memoirs written by (...) people diagnosed with mental disorder, the paper concludes that a DSM diagnosis is a double-edged sword for self- concept. On the one hand, it sets the subject’s experience in an established classificatory system which can facilitate self-understanding by providing insight into subject’s condition and guiding her personal growth, as well as treatment and recovery. In this sense, the DSM diagnosis may have positive repercussions on self-development. On the other hand, however, given the DSM’s symptom-based approach and its adoption of the Biomedical Disease model, a diagnosis may force the subject to make sense of her condition divorced from other elements in her life that may be affecting her mental- health. It may lead her frame her experience only as an irreversible imbalance. This form of self-understanding may set limits on the subject’s hopes of recovery and may create impediments to her flourishing. (shrink)

An introduction to philosophy of language since Frege, focusing on the 20th century.

In this essay I recover the juridical applications of `interest' in Roman law, and examine how their initial relationship to financial practices shifted, for a theoretical appreciation of interest-related subjectivity. Drawing on Hegel's discussion of Roman law, I explore the retrospective narrative of subjectivity constructed by the adjudication of interests before the term `interest' came to apply to money. Examining Albert Hirschman's argument that rationality of interest derives from its origins as a euphemism for usury, I describe how the verbal (...) change reflects the incursion of money into legal terrain that previously excluded it, representing a moment of categorical erosion within the law. I argue that monetary inflation is a critical context for interpreting the effects of this categorical erosion on interest-related subjectivity. Inflation replaces the retrospective narrative of identity with one that is future-oriented and is no longer determined at any single site of adjudication, and therefore remains contested. (shrink)

The accusation that contemporary political philosophy is carried out in too ahistorical a fashion depends upon it being possible for historical facts to ground normative political principles. This they cannot do. Each of the seven ways in which it might be thought possible for them to do so fails for one or more of four reasons: History yields no timeless set of universal moral values; it displays no convergence upon such a set; it reveals no univocal moral or cultural context (...) in the present; the failure of an ethical tradition to successfully respond to criticism over a long period of time is no guarantee of its inability to do so. Because historical critiques of contemporary normative thought rely upon one or more of these things holding true, they are, as a class of arguments, to be rejected. (shrink)

This paper explores potential points of synthesis between two leading theorists in Critical Theory and Critical International Relations Theory, Axel Honneth and Andrew Linklater. Whereas Linklater's recent work on the harm principle has turned away from the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School in favour of Norbert Elias and process sociology, the paper observes a fundamental complementarity between harm and the precepts of recognition theory that can bridge these otherwise disparate approaches to emancipation. The paper begins with a brief (...) overview of Linklater's emancipatory vision before examining his recent turn to the harm principle and Eliasian process sociology. It is argued that Honneth's work, particularly the ideas of mutual recognition and the diagnosis of social pathologies, clearly resonant with Linklater's defence of ethical universalism and can help further the emancipatory project of Critical International Relations Theory. In particular, Honneth's intersubjective concept of autonomy is argued to provide a normative and empirical standard for emancipation premised on the historically progressive expansion of attitudes of recognition, born out of social struggles, toward the ideal institutionalisation of mutual recognition in world politics. (shrink)

Digitalisation is attracting much scholarly attention at present. However, scholars often take its benefits for granted, overlooking the essential question: “Does digital technology make us better?” This paper aims to help fill this gap by examining digitalisation as a form of government (digitocracy) and the way it shapes a new kind of man: _animal digitalis_. I argue that the digitalised man is animal-like rather than machine-like. This man does not use efficient and cold machine-like language, but is rather emotionalised through (...) digital technology. If those who are ruled acted like machines, data would not be produced on a mass scale, and machine learning would stop learning. Digital man has animal features and is ruled by his brain’s reward system. We need to abandon this new form of government and the resulting man. To overcome digitalisation, we need a humanism that recovers the proper place of man over animals and artefacts, but maintains respect for the value of nature. (shrink)

Most contemporary moral philosophy is concerned with issues of rationality, universality, impartiality, and principle. By contrast Laurence Blum is concerned with the psychology of moral agency. The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. Blum takes up the challenge of Iris Murdoch to articulate a vision of moral excellence that provides a worthy aspiration for human beings. Drawing on (...) accounts of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust Blum argues that impartial principle can mislead us about the variety of forms of moral excellence. (shrink)

In recent decades historians of science have argued that observation became something of a way of life in the early modern period. This article expands this analysis by shifting focus from observational practices within natural and experimental philosophy to a number of discourses and practices of self-examination and self-observation in eighteenth-century Germany. While the initial aim of these was therapeutic rather than scientific, therapeutic connotations were partly replaced by epistemic virtues and techniques adopted from natural and experimental philosophy toward the (...) end of the century. The article further argues that the subordination of self-observation to scientific modes of procedure reflected the increasingly radical interest in human subjectivity and, by extension, the emergence of a modern civic and individual self. (shrink)

This paper searches early Greek texts (Homer, Herakleitos, Parmenides, Plato) for the genesis of the idea of the individual mind or soul as a unitary site of consciousness, and explores the relation of this genesis to the first monetisation in history. Money simultaneously promotes the isolated autonomy of the individual and provides a model (the unification of diversity by semi-abstract substance) that shapes both the unity of individual consciousness and the presocratic conception of the cosmos as constituted by a single (...) semi-abstract substance. The argument confirms and develops the importance accorded by Alfred Sohn-Rethel to the ‘real abstraction’ of commodity-exchange in the origins of Greek philosophy. (shrink)

The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the US/Mexico Border David Bacon Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004 348 pp., cloth $27.50 0520237781 More than 10 years have passed since the 1...

We argue that two long-term goals of AI research stand in tension with one another. The first involves creating AI that is safe, where this is understood as solving the problem of value alignment. The second involves creating artificial general intelligence, meaning AI that operates at or beyond human capacity across all or many intellectual domains. Our argument focuses on the human capacity to make what we call “existential choices”, choices that transform who we are as persons, including transforming what (...) we most deeply value or desire. It is a capacity for a kind of value misalignment, in that the values held prior to making such choices can be significantly different from (misaligned with) the values held after making them. Because of the connection to existentialist philosophers who highlight these choices, we call the resulting form of risk “existentialist risk.” It is, roughly, the risk that results from AI taking an active role in authoring its own values rather than passively going along with the values given to it. On our view, human-like intelligence requires a human-like capacity for value misalignment, which is in tension with the possibility of guaranteeing value alignment between AI and humans. (shrink)

Such a bewildering and contradictory welter of behaviors and traits are connoted by “honor” and its best equivalents in other languages that analyses of the concept have daunted philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and literary scholars for millennia. Is it an external good given — and revoked just as easily — by others? Or does “honor” name an inner good that’s absolutely in our control: our integrity, our very commitment to right conduct? Is honor a central moral virtue — (...) as when we might say that “all was lost, save our honor”? Or is it a good quality that’s not-quite “moral,” or indeed even an antiquated virtue hostile to true morality? Is the honorable man a heroic figure who protects the weak, or one who can be expected to bully the weak, as in the case of “honor killings”? Is honor aristocratic and inegalitarian, and thus a virtue that enables and ennobles what’s essentially oppression? Or is honor a signal virtue of fair-dealing, fair-fighting, and fair competition, as evidenced in sportsmanship? (shrink)

What is a moral argument? A straightforward answer is that a moral argument is an argument dealing with moral issues, such as the permissibility of killing in certain circumstances. I call this the thin sense of ‘moral argument’. Arguments that we find in normative and applied ethics are almost invariably moral in this sense. However, they often fail to be moral in other respects. In this article, I discuss four ways in which morality can be absent from moral arguments in (...) the thin sense. If these arguments suffer from an absence of morality in at least one of these ways, they are not moral arguments in what I will call the thick sense of ‘moral argument’. Because only moral arguments in the thick sense could possibly qualify as proper responses to moral problems, the absence of morality in thin arguments means that these arguments will fail to give us a reason to do whatever they claim that we ought to do, even if we see no independent reason to question the truth of the premises or the logical validity of the argument. (shrink)

Over every and each sport event, a dark veil spreads and obfuscates the celebration: doping. Although anti-doping policies have been widely applied, controlling and diminishing this phenomenon has not been achieved yet and the use of doping is commonplace. In this article, I propose the concept of narcissistic civilization as a tool to interpret this phenomenon. I seek for a parallel reading between the Freudian idea of narcissism and its extension to social narcissism by Fromm, together with Heidegger’s analysis of (...) technology, keeping in mind that doping is a technological application. In this way I point out that both theories share a common view in that humans tend to fail in the distinction between the external reality as an object and their own self as the interpreter, that is between the ¨I¨ and the ¨not I¨. By making this fusion of the two theories that originate from different intellectual traditions, I aspire to provide an interpretation tool for the broad use of doping: I conclude that doping can be understood with the assumption of a narcissistic civilization, focused on technology, that calls for the use of PEDs. (shrink)

Over every and each sport event, a dark veil spreads and obfuscates the celebration: doping. Although anti-doping policies have been widely applied, controlling and diminishing this phenomenon has not been achieved yet and the use of doping is commonplace. In this article, I propose the concept of narcissistic civilization as a tool to interpret this phenomenon. I seek for a parallel reading between the Freudian idea of narcissism and its extension to social narcissism by Fromm, together with Heidegger’s analysis of (...) technology, keeping in mind that doping is a technological application. In this way I point out that both theories share a common view in that humans tend to fail in the distinction between the external reality as an object and their own self as the interpreter, that is between the ¨I¨ and the ¨not I¨. By making this fusion of the two theories that originate from different intellectual traditions, I aspire to provide an interpretation tool for the broad use of doping: I conclude that doping can be understood with the assumption of a narcissistic civilization, focused on technology, that calls for the use of PEDs. (shrink)

Contemporary neo-Aristotelianism attempts to ground normative constraints on action on the notion of human nature and this opens it to two main objections: Firstly, human nature seems to be too indeterminate to set constraints on action; secondly, it is unclear why knowledge of human nature should motivate agents. This essay considers the contribution that Wittgenstein’s notion of form of life can give in answering these challenges. It suggests that forms of life are not objects of analysis, but rather a new (...) philosophical method, which allows us also to investigate human volitional capacities and their normative significance for practical rationality. (shrink)

To understand how we have become what we are requires, following Foucault, not a theory but an `analytics' which examines how technologies of power and knowledge have, since antiquity, intertwined and developed in concrete and historical frameworks. Distilling from Foucault's oeuvre as a whole a rough periodization of western political rationalities, this article shows how the processes whereby some people discipline or govern others are frequently closely connected to procedures of identity-constitution and knowledge-production. Platonic, Stoic and Christian pursuits of self-mastery (...) and self-knowledge, often via the intervention of an external master, were initially confined to an elite, but thereafter were amplified and generalized to encompass entire populations in conjunction with the rise of the modern state. Via techniques of confession and ascetic conduct, faith and empiricism, and selfreflection and everyday reality, western political rationalities, in the form of combined totalization and individualization technologies whereby some (struggle to) discipline others even as all (are exhorted to) discipline themselves, have come to dominate the globe. (shrink)

The question of the viability of theological eudaimonism as an interpretation of the moral life has generated increasing debate in recent years. This essay aims to advance the debate about theological eudaimonism (and eudaimonism more generally) by addressing a closely related but insufficiently discussed issue: the nature of human agency and its relationship to value. The most commonly raised objection to eudaimonism is that it is objectionably agent‐oriented. I argue that worries about objectionable self‐orientation often stem from importing foreign pictures (...) of agency into the eudaimonist tradition. I make this case through an analysis of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent critique of eudaimonism. Wolterstorff presupposes a common contemporary conception of agency. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas and Elizabeth Anderson, I show that other conceptions of agency are available. Clarity about the nature of human agency and its relationship to value will bring greater clarity to the debate about eudaimonism and self‐orientation. (shrink)

This article draws from Charles Taylor’s work of retrieval to advance moral foundations theory (MFT). Taylor’s contribution to MFT lies in his insistence that we retrieve the moral sources that have helped constitute, substantiate, and give meaning to individuals’ moral sensibilities. Applying Taylor’s insights to MFT, this article seeks to advance a view of moral foundations that connects them more explicitly to their underlying moral sources. Using this retrieved account of moral foundations, this article then addresses current issues within moral (...) foundations research and theory. Finally, this article suggests ways in which Taylor’s philosophy can contribute to three areas within business ethics: ethical leadership, behavioral ethics, and ethics pedagogy. (shrink)

Stories in the Zhuangzi detailing expert artisans and other extraordinary people are often read as celebrations of “skills” or “knacks.” In this paper, I will argue that they would be more accurately understood as “coping” stories. Taken as a celebration of one’s “skill” or “knack” they transform the Zhuangzi into an implicit advocate of conforming to, or even identifying with, one’s social roles. I will argue that the stories of artisans and extraordinarily skilled people are less about cultivating one’s talents (...) so as to “find one’s calling,” better fulfill social expectations, or achieve oneness with Dao, than they are concerned with developing strategies for coping with natural and social contingencies. Read in this way, there is much to learn from the Zhuangzi when reflecting on contemporary social and political issues, especially those related to meritocratic hubris. (shrink)

During the last few years two major volumes have been published, both greatly revised versions of earlier Gifford Lectures: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age ( 2007 ) and Raimon Panikkar’s The Rhythm of Being ( 2010 ). The two volumes are similar in some respects and very dissimilar in others. Both thinkers complain about the glaring blemishes of the modern, especially the contemporary age; both deplore above all a certain deficit of religiosity. The two authors differ, however, both in the (...) details of their diagnosis and in their proposed remedies. Taylor views the modern age—styled as “secular age”—as marked by a slide into secular agnosticism, into “exclusive humanism”, and above all into an “immanent frame” excluding theistic “transcendence”. Although sharing the concern about “loss of meaning”, Panikkar does not find its source in the abandonment of (mono)theistic transcendence; on the contrary, both radical transcendence and agnostic immanence are responsible for the deficit of genuine faith. For him, recovery of faith requires an acknowledgment of our being in the world, as part of the “rhythm of being” happening in a holistic or “cosmotheandric” mode. In classical Indian terminology, while Taylor’s emphasis on the transcendence-immanence tension reflects ultimately a dualistic perspective (dvaita), Panikkar’s holistic notion of the rhythm of being captures the core of Advaita Vendanta. (shrink)

This paper draws on an in-depth phenomenological analysis of some interviews taken from volunteers, inviting them to reflect on their lived experiences of meaningfulness in the context of volunteering and citizenship. It is found that while some testimonies reinforce the standard conceptions of meaningfulness, other testimonies vary from it. The main challenge of this contribution consists in phenomenologically describing this alternative picture of meaningfulness, depicted as the event of wit(h)nessing. In a final part, the authors consider how volunteering is at (...) times especially prone to further experiences of wit(h)nessing. (shrink)

:This essay explores the concept of the connected self-owner, which takes account of the metaphysical significance of relations among persons for persons’ capacities to be owners. This concept of the self-owner conflicts with the traditional libertarian understanding of the self-owner as atomistic or essentially separable from all others. I argue that the atomistic self cannot be a self-owner. A self-owner is a moral person with intentions, desires, and thoughts. But in order to have intentions, desires, and thoughts a being must (...) relate to others through language and norm-guided behavior. Individual beings require the pre-existence of norms and norm-givers to bootstrap their selves, and norms, norm-givers, and norm-takers are necessary to continue to support the self. That means, I argue, that the self who can be an owner is essentially connected. Next, I ask how humans become connected selves and whether that connection matters morally. I distinguish among those connections that support development of valuable capacities. One such capacity is the autonomous individual. I argue that the social connections that allow the development of autonomous individuals have moral value and should be fostered. On the basis of these two values, I argue that we can support at least two nonvoluntary obligations, one negative and one positive, that we can ground in our metaphysical essence as connected self-owners. (shrink)

Some narrative approaches assume a tight relation between narrative and selfhood. They hold that the self-understanding of persons as individuals possessing a set of particular character traits is above all narratively structured for it is constituted by stories persons tell or can tell about their lives. Against this view, it is argued that self-understanding is also characterized by certain non-narrative and invariant mental features. In order to show this, a non-narrative awareness of self-identity over time will be analyzed. It will (...) be argued that this basic form of awareness plays a fundamental role for the possibility of a richer form of self-understanding. (shrink)

‘Liberty’, as a word, is thrown about contemporary society as casually as a ball is on a summer’s day, and yet, does anyone have a grasp on what it is? If it is freedom from limitation, then liberty must represent nothing less than consciousness without restraint. But though this straightforward definition implies its acquisition to be equally straightforward, the full spectrum of liberty would certainly prove to be one of the most elusive concepts imaginable. As a result, what we have, (...) and what we throw about so indifferently, is a Substitute - a poor kind of replica of the real thing. True liberty - Omniversal liberty - is much less tangible however, and represents the equilibrium that occurs when anything is possible, but where the capacity to ever allow one possibility to dominate over another becomes impossible to maintain. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the routine moral burden of occupying a professional role and having to negotiate tensions between the normative expectations attached to that role and one's own personal moral compass. Using an example to introduce this central issue I then seek to explore it through a discussion of the tensions between, and spaces between, ‘identifying’ with one's role and ‘separating’ oneself from one's role. I suggest that ethical integrity at work is revealed through the successful negotiation of (...) these tensions, but that such negotiation depends upon the power and other resources available to individual professionals. Finally I argue that this discussion of ‘the ethics of role occupation’ has important implication for ‘the ethics of role construction’ and adds weight to concerns about the potential moral costs of managerialism. (shrink)

David Luban identifies a tension between Arendt's conception of ethnic identification in a context of persecution and her conception of humanity. That tension pertains to the reality—or realities—that Arendt addresses: the moral reality of her Bildung that appears throughout her work, and is centered on the “dignity of man,” on the one hand, and the divisive, “political” reality that she was forced to face when “attacked as a Jew,” on the other. By implicitly accepting that in a context of persecution (...) one cannot escape the framing relevance of the “political” —an idea that is also present in her imaginary condemnation speech of Eichmann—Arendt betrays a fundamental theme of her work: “forgiveness” and the inherent possibility of a “new beginning.”. (shrink)

Charles Taylor’s method of philosophical argumentation is distinctive, interlacing historical, ontological, phenomenological, hermeneutical, theistic, and ethical strands. His writings contribute t...

What would my life have been like if I had been born more intelligent? Or taller? Or a member of the opposite sex? Or a non-biological being? It is plausible that some of these questions make sense, while others stretch the limits of sense making. In addressing questions of how I might have been, genetic essentialism is popular, but this article argues that genetic essentialism, and other versions of origin essentialism for organisms, must be rejected. It considers the prospects for (...) counterpart theory and shows how counterpart theory can be used to illuminate volitional accounts of identity as proposed by Harry Frankfurt. This enables one to make sense of claims that, say, being gay, or Deaf, or Black, can be essential to someone's identity. The discussion is then extended to show how it can be made applicable to the transworld identity theorist who denies that individuals possess essential properties. (shrink)

By dovetailing the classical concepts of virtue, beauty, harmony and happiness with the cardinal values of modern imagination, life and freedom, Agnes Heller galvanizes modernity's anthropological reflexivity and hints at the prospect of a classicism pertinent to the present. Beyond nostalgia for an ancient past or apology for a contemporary present, her moral anthropology is approached via a dialectical elucidation of aspects of epicurean theory attuned to modernity's complexity. Under the contemporary condition of waning postmodern challenges, escalating confusion and cynicism, (...) moral anthropology's task is as one of probing modernity's destiny for a non-predatory humanism that combines the existential wisdom of ancient theory with modern values. (shrink)

Bernard Williams briefly discusses agent regret in his broader account of moral luck. The present paper first outlines one way to develop Williams’s notion with reference to the unintended harm; it then suggests that agent regret can be counteracted by externalizing the action that caused unintended harm, in Harry Frankfurt’s sense of externalization; and then the present paper argues that apology is a mechanism by which a person can externalize an offending action/effect—in that way counteracting agent regret. This function for (...) apology—self-repair—is different from others described in the literature, which address the role of apology in repairing relationships. The present paper describes a nonfictional example, that of a veteran of the U.S. war in Iraq who contacts a family gravely injured by him and his combat unit; the veteran is motivated to contact the family to apologize. The example serves as a prototypical case of agent regret. The example is taken from a recent literature on the clinical psychology of self-inflicted “moral injury”; categorizing this example of moral injury as agent regret also helps broaden our understanding of moral injury as a philosophical category and as a psychological phenomenon. (shrink)

Should we grant rights to artificially intelligent robots? Most current and near-future robots do not meet the hard criteria set by deontological and utilitarian theory. Virtue ethics can avoid this problem with its indirect approach. However, both direct and indirect arguments for moral consideration rest on ontological features of entities, an approach which incurs several problems. In response to these difficulties, this paper taps into a different conceptual resource in order to be able to grant some degree of moral consideration (...) to some intelligent social robots: it sketches a novel argument for moral consideration based on social relations. It is shown that to further develop this argument we need to revise our existing ontological and social-political frameworks. It is suggested that we need a social ecology, which may be developed by engaging with Western ecology and Eastern worldviews. Although this relational turn raises many difficult issues and requires more work, this paper provides a rough outline of an alternative approach to moral consideration that can assist us in shaping our relations to intelligent robots and, by extension, to all artificial and biological entities that appear to us as more than instruments for our human purposes. (shrink)

Robert Musil's unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities is testimony that Arthur Schopenhauer's legacy in early-twentieth-century European culture cuts across the familiar opposition between neo-romantic irrationalism and scientific positivism. I adduce evidence in Musil's unfinished novel and contemporaneous essays and journal entries that his utopian vision of an integration of ethical inwardness and scientific objectivity, an integration productive of an existence without qualities, is symptomatic of a Schopenhauerian outlook that prevailed in Europe êntre deux guerres and yielded a crisis of (...) narratives and consequent moral ambivalence. Musil's literary style achieves a vivid rendering of the causes and conditions of the ethical paralysis afflicting the modern self committed to the exploration of inwardness. (shrink)

Velleman, MacIntyre, and others have argued for the compositional view that lives can be other than equally good for the person who lives them even though they contain all and only the same moments, and that this is explained by their narrative structure. I argue instead for explanation by self-realization, partly by interpreting Siegfried Sassoon’s exemplary life-narrative. I decide between the two explanations by distinguishing the various features of the radial concept of narrative, and showing, for each, either that self-realization (...) is just as good an account, or that we should prefer the self-realization account, of the composition it is supposed to explain. I conclude that, if the shape of a life matters, it matters because some shapes are self-realizations, not because they are narratives. (shrink)

Arendt’s theoretical influence is generally traced to Heidegger and experientially to the traumatic events that occurred in Europe during the Second World War. Here, we suggest that Arendt’s conception of politics may be usefully enriched via a proto-anthropic principle found in Augustine and adopted by Arendt throughout her writings. By appealing to this anthropic principle; that without a spectator there could be no world; a profound connection is made between the ‘cosmic jackpot’ of life in the universe and the uniquely (...) human activity that takes place in the political realm. By making this connection we suggest that solutions present themselves to a central puzzle arising in Arendt’s thought: namely, what it is that people actually do in the political realm. The first solution directly addresses the issue of content: what people talk about in Arendt’s public space. The second addresses the importance of ‘maintaining’ a space of appearances. The third considers the effect of participating in and observing the public domain. Consequently, we conclude that, for Arendt, action is nothing less than the activity of ‘world-making.’. (shrink)

Contemporary poststructural and hermeneutical theories emphasize the prereflective opacity of the self and the consequent inarticulateness concerning the deep prereflective layers (‘prejudices’) of self-understanding. Some of such ontologically significant prejudices, some hermeneutical views hold, are inescapable and so the self cannot reflectively refuse or overcome them. This paper proposes the Hegelian notion of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology as the restless, unreflective–reflective negation of its own nothingness or contingent, open givenness as an alternative that both accepts the hermeneutical insight concerning the (...) deep prereflective layers of self-understanding and rejects the inescapability of ontologically significant ‘prejudices’. Hegelian self-consciousness is minimally reflective, even though it is intertwined with its prereflective, ritualistic basis and its historical situatedness. The paper depicts the reflective dimension of the prereflectively grounded Hegelian self by explicating the meaning of the Phenomenology’s conception of Bildung as ‘cultural participation’. The self that is continuously remade through its dialectical relation (cultural participation) to the social substance or Spirit is minimally reflective in the sense that it sees itself reflected or externalized in the world of its engagement, and because it inserts its own conception upon the world by participating in it. This reconceptualization of the dialectic between self and social substance, thus, escapes overemphasizing the prereflective layers of the self’s hermeneutical background without falling back on the Cartesian deworlded self of reflection and thought. (shrink)

In this paper I look at various ways that interpersonal and social relations can be seen as required for autonomy. I then consider cases where those dynamics might play out or not in potentially paternalistic situations. In particular, I consider cases of especially vulnerable persons who are attempting to reconstruct a sense of practical identity required for their autonomy and need the potential paternalist’s aid in doing so. I then draw out the implications for standard liberal principles of paternalism, specifically (...) in clinical or therapeutic situations. The picture of potential paternalism that emerges here is much more of a dynamic, interpersonal scenario rather than a case of two separate individuals making decisions independent of each other. (shrink)

I am called herewith a collaborator-in-chief, mountain climber, and prophet. They all arise from the writers' largesse, not facts on the ground. But I will embrace them momentarily and then turn to...

Chopra and Weiss address perhaps the fundamental issue in international relations today: the sacrosanct sets of sovereignty. The word "sovereignty" explains why the international community has difficulty countering human rights violations.

Naturalistic theories of disease appeal to concepts of biological function, and use the notion of dysfunction as the basis of their definitions. Debates in the philosophy of biology demonstrate how attributing functions in organisms and establishing the function-dysfunction distinction is by no means straightforward. This problematization of functional ascription has undermined naturalistic theories and led some authors to abandon the concept of dysfunction, favoring instead definitions based in normative criteria or phenomenological approaches. Although this work has enhanced our understanding of (...) disease and illness, we need not necessarily abandon naturalistic concepts of function and dysfunction in the disease debate. This article attempts to move towards a new naturalistic theory of disease that overcomes the limitations of previous definitions and offers advantages in the clinical setting. Our approach involves a re-evaluation of concepts of biological function employed by naturalistic theories. Drawing on recent insights from the philosophy of biology, we develop a contextual and evaluative account of function that is better suited to clinical medicine and remains consistent with contemporary naturalism. We also show how an updated naturalistic view shares important affinities with normativist and phenomenological positions, suggesting a possibility for consilience in the disease debate. (shrink)

Nursing scholars have called for nursing approaches with children that ensure the promotion of their childhood, contesting dominant adult-based approaches that are adapted for practice with children. Although the nursing literature includes many important advances in the promotion of child-centered approaches, there are still significant gaps in fully recognizing the complexities of childhood within nursing. Within this paper, I (a) outline some key advances in nursing approaches with children, sometimes referred to as “Children's Nursing” (shifting away from “Pediatric Nursing” conceptions (...) that may be focused more on diseases than childhood); (b) highlight key gaps in current conceptions of Children's Nursing, namely the inadequate integration of work from the interdisciplinary field of Childhood Studies which challenges dominant age-based developmental models which discount children's voices and experiences as “immature”; and (c) propose a Childhood Ethics-based framework that bridges advances in Children's Nursing with those within Childhood Studies, which I refer to as the VOICE Children's Nursing Framework. The latter is rooted in the recognition of (a) children as active agents with capacities and interests in participating in discussions and decisions that affect them, and (b) best interests as the foundational basis for determining the nursing care required by a child which should be defined in an individualized manner, informed by a child's expressed aspirations and concerns. This Framework integrates biological, relational, and ethical dimensions of children's wellbeing and draws on hermeneutic approaches for eliciting and interpreting children's agential expressions, which involves continuous part/whole shifting to meticulously discern what is meaningful within a situation. The Framework is operationalized for clinical practice through the use of orienting questions, which is demonstrated through discussion of a clinical exemplar. The paper closes with proposed future directions for Children's Nursing development in practice, education, and research. (shrink)

In early visits to Lothlorien—which is a loosely Pagan community of environmentalists in Indiana—I was confounded by attempts to categorize either the place or the people. As one of the founders said, “I tend to run from labels so I don't know what I am. It's safer that way.” In this paper I explore four members’ narratives about the emotional high points in their lives, where they often cross the usual boundaries of self and other. At the same time the (...) subjectivity at the core of these experiences is something that is felt and that cannot be dismissed as a discursive construct. Through these narratives I attempt to understand selfhood as a process—experientially inescapable but essentially in flux. I see a strong case for anthropologists moving beyond an overly neat, overly dichotomized view of “Western” and “non-Western” senses of self. (shrink)

The modern West has vigorously sought to overcome death, or at the very least minimize the suffering that it entails. Whereas the former has been predominantly pursued through modern scientific medicine, the minimization of the adversity of death and dying has been sought through ‘death technologies’. This technologization of death is analyzed in light of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological philosophy. The analysis begins with an outline of the fundamental tenets of Heidegger’s ‘philosophy of Being’. In turn, his philosophical framework is utilized (...) to highlight the manner in which the technologization of dying serves to conceal the central existential questions about being and finitude that dying gives rise to. The paper concludes with a discussion of how Heidegger’s work can inspire a more authentic stance toward dying. Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych is referred to in order to illustrate Heidegger’s construal of this existential struggle toward dying. (shrink)

Within his earliest contributions to the human sciences, Charles Taylor challenged dominant behavioral views by advancing a hermeneutical conception of human agency. For Taylor, persons continually...

After the demise of Christianity, Western society did not become secular, according to Emile Durkheim, but located foundations in a new religion he calls the “cult of the individual.” This religion holds the rational individual person as sacred, and corresponds to a multi-faceted, complex, and diverse society united around individual democratic rights and modern science. Different traditional religions can co-exist in the cult of the individual, but only if they accept a subordinate status in relation to it. Durkheim maintains, however, (...) that all religions construct authoritative regimes of truth and moral obligations, setting the stage for conflict. How then should modern democracies respond to challenges to their authority from traditional religions? This article argues that a Durkheimian response would be to assert the values of the cult of the individual, as this is the only way to maintain the integrity and viability of Western democratic society. (shrink)

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science have recently become increasingly receptive to the hypothesis of extended cognition, according to which external artifacts such as our laptops and smartphones can—under appropriate circumstances—feature as material realizers of a person's cognitive processes. We argue that, to the extent that the hypothesis of extended cognition is correct, our legal and ethical theorizing and practice must be updated by broadening our conception of personal assault so as to include intentional harm toward gadgets that have been (...) appropriately integrated. We next situate the theoretical case for extended personal assault within the context of some recent ethical and legal cases and close with critical discussion. (shrink)