While various definitions of moral distress have been proposed, some agreement exists that it results from illegitimate constraints in clinical practice affecting healthcare professionals’ moral agency. If we are to reduce moral distress, instruments measuring it should provide relevant information about such illegitimate constraints. Unfortunately, existing instruments fail to do so. We discuss here several shortcomings of major instruments in use: their inability to determine whether reports of moral distress involve an accurate assessment of the requisite clinical and logistical facts (...) in play, whether the distress in question is aptly characterized as moral, and whether the moral distress reported is an appropriate target of elimination. Such failures seriously limit the ability of empirical work on moral distress to foster appropriate change. (shrink)

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.

The early modern period (roughly, 1600–1800 ce) in Europe brought tremendous changes in intellectual, political, and cultural life. It was a period in which philosophical debates were inevitably bound up with questions about the nature and sources of religious truth. A chronological examination of some of the period’s major thinkers highlights two issues that were central to the development of philosophy of religion in the period. The first concerns the relations between God, the soul, and the body; the other concerns (...) the relationship between human reason and divine revelation. (shrink)

A critique of Strawson's distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics.

What would it take to design a real place online where real learning would happen?

How Heidegger criticizes and "locates" science, and some problems with what he is trying to do.

Studying Plato's "unwritten doctrines" in the light of his discussion of limit and unlimited in his dialogue Philebus. The essay raises also the question whether there is too much "atomism" in the usual presentation of Plato's Forms as individual absolute entities, rather than as themselves derived from a more fundamental limit/unlimited ontology.

Habermas's criticizes Heidegger for insulating totalities of meaning from possible overturning by attempts to invalidate individual claims. I first state Habermas's criticism, then elaborate an example from Heideggerthat supports Habermas's attack. Then I defend Heidegger by distinguishing levels of meaning in Heidegger's "world" from Habermas's more propositional "lifeworld." I conclude by accepting Habermas's objection restated in terms of the contrast between transcendental and local conditions. If Heidegger is unwilling to pay the price of either Kantian generality or Hegelian unity, he (...) should give up the simple priority of his epochal understandings of being. (shrink)

This essay argues against global plans and hierarchical systems, whether in urban planning or art and life.

Hegel congratulated himself on noticing that the German verb aufheben embodied a speculative dialectic in the interrelation of its multiple meanings. Translators have been hard put to find an equivalent English word. I think I have found a similar word in English, which, if not exactly a translation, still shows a similar interaction among the contrasting motions of its different meanings.

In the popular press and the halls of politics, controversies over evolution are increasingly strident these days. Hegel is relevant in this connection, even though he rejected the theories of evolution he knew about, because he wanted rational understanding but without claims to intelligent design. He is reported to have said that nature has no history, but a closer examination will show that his ideaqs are more nuanced and that there is more room for darwinian ideas than one might expect, (...) though not enough to allow the full Darwinian contingency of form. (shrink)

A discussion of the logical role of particular concepts in Robert Pippin's reading Hegel as a theorist of modernity, with special reference to the question whether modernity can be surpassed or left behind.

The year 1989 marked the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Martin Heidegger. What has happened to his thought in America? This essay offers a perspective on what I take to be the main trends and some representative works in Heidegger studies on the American side of the Atlantic (with perforce some simplifications both within and among the trends I mention).

In the introduction to his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel speaks of metaphysics as “the entire range of the universal determinations of thought, as it were the diamond net into which everything is brought and thereby first made intelligible. Every educated consciousness has its metaphysics, an instinctive way of thinking”. Both Wittgenstein and Hegel see our many languages and forms of life as constituted by different diamond nets of categories/grammars. I argue that both Wittgenstein and Hegel take a non-reductive attitude toward (...) this plurality of local ontologies, but that they disagree about what that plurality implies for history and philosophy. Their disagreements come in part from their differing choice of examples, influenced by atomism and holism. Even more, their disagreements stem from divergent notions about the structure and mode of being of those diamond nets. During the discussion, I distinguish three uses of the word “ontology”, and I ask each thinker about what might improve the other’s philosophical project. (shrink)

When I was first studying Hegel I encountered quite divergent readings of his views on religion. The teacher who first presented Hegel to me was a Jesuit, Quentin Lauer at Fordham University, who read Hegel as a Christian theologian providing a better metaphysical system for understanding the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. When I studied at Yale, Kenley Dove read Hegel as the first thoroughly atheistic philosopher, who presented the conditions of thought without reference to any foundational absolute being. (...) Meanwhile, also at Yale, John Findlay read us a deeply Neo-Platonic Hegel who taught about absolute forms held in a cosmic mind. In giving my own reading I want to talk about the ways Hegel redefines both metaphysics and religion. I would like to approach these issues by way of the medieval controversy over double truth, which was a previous conflict between religion and science. (shrink)

Our task is the preservation of historic towns. In America as in Europe historic town centers are surrounded by recent additions and suburban sprawl. It is tempting to imagine the task of preservation as protecting our historical heritage from a featureless wave of mediocrity, as the worldwide commercial civilization overwhelms local cultures. This story is familiar from the writings of Kenneth Frampton and others: sprawl, homogenization, loss of distinctive local and regional form. I want to disagree with this story. From (...) what force are we trying to save the historic towns? Might not that force have its own new kinds of order? Might that new order be already at work inside the historic towns? Are its effects only negative? I want to question a presupposition common in many discussion of historic preservation. This is the presupposition that a spatially distinct historic center belongs to a single community that possesses a unified self-consciousness and a unified aesthetic self-image. Local communities less and less correspond to bounded spatial areas, and spatial areas contain less and less homogeneous communities. There is growing a new kind of discontinuous unity, which is the theme of this essay. (shrink)

Arakawa and Gins have been fomenting revolution for a long time. In the last twenty years their attention has turned more and more towards architecture and urban planning as a way of reforming our bodily existence. Their proposals enter daily life rather than staying in the isolated sphere of the museum or gallery. These constructions are to be lived in, not contemplated. Will daily life then blunt or sharpen Arakawa and Gins's power to educate and revise our "architectural bodies"?

Eugene Gendlin claims that he wants "to think with more than conceptual structures, forms, distinctions, with more than cut and presented things" (WCS 29).1 He wants situations in their concreteness to be something we can think with, not just analyze conceptually. He wants to show that "conceptual patterns are doubtful and always exceeded, but the excess seems unable to think itself. It seems to become patterns when we try to think it. This has been the problem of twentieth century philosophy" (...) (WCS 29). As a result he has "long been concerned with what is not formed although always in some form" (TAD 1). In this essay I would like to explore some of the issues surrounding the relation of the unformed and the formed. Gendlin says that "we get beyond the forms by thinking precisely in them" (TAD 1). The two emphasized words have to be considered separately as well as together. In many essays Gendlin's main concern is with the "precisely": can something that is not fully formed and definite still direct us as we carry forward language and action? My discussion begins with that issue; I suggest ways that Gendlin's proposal connects with and differs from some current ideas in epistemology and the philosophy of language. Then my discussion moves to the "in": what sense can we make of the formed being unformed? Finally I suggest that Gendlin's program runs into some difficulties in this connection. (shrink)

Centers have been out of intellectual and political fashion, because they have been often oppressive. We both celebrate and worry about postmodern fragmentation as we enact it in our technology, while fearing hidden centralization. But centering is important. I would like to mull over some issues concerning centers and criticism.

We need to give up single visions that are supposed to embrace social and place totalities. We live in overlapping nets rather than single places. We cannot plan unlimited geometrical vistas a la Versailles; but that was always an illusion, and today it would be an oppression. Can we still plan like Sixtus at Rome? Only if we also encourage other modes of organization at the same time. The whole may often end up more like Tokyo, with corners of design (...) and beauty that do not make an overall plan. (shrink)

The old spiritual masters told us to be in the world but not of it. We moderns have given this a secular twist. We are in our world — we have values, ways of life, world pictures — but not of it — we are to be aware of our freedom, aware of the contingency of our world and its dependence on factors many of which are or will be under our control. We both inhabit our world and enjoy the (...) status of distanced controllers. Or, if our lack of control and our dependence on historical and social factors is being emphasized, we are to inhabit our world with a certain knowing irony, since we understand the process by which it came about, even if we cannot change it. We hnave found ways to institutionalize this split-level identity. -/- Such institutions posit a separation of form and content. In the free market, in procedural justice, in free speech we live out that separation. This parallels cognitive and volitional theories of Kantian and Utilitarian descent, which make the same separation. All these give us freedom by having us seek our identity in a formal process above all content, but at the cost of introducing distance and irony. -/- Martin Heidegger's response to modernity often sounds like a romantic flight from modern distances. He clearly wants to overcome our split-level existence, the uneasy balance of facticity and freedom, which for him is but another manifestation of the will to power which he fines lurking behind our tradition. But to what degree is his own overcoming of modernity also susceptible to split-level living and ironic distance? (shrink)

A study of how for Hegel the relation of architecture to building function has varied throughout history. Architecture strives to liberate itself, never completely, from domination by function.

What does it mean to be a modern American today? These slides summarize the discussion from five lectures delivered in winter 2019 at the University of Oregon's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. The lectures themselves are available on YouTube -/- Just how different is American from other cultural identities? We have thought of ourselves as the specially modern nation, spreading the revolutionary gospel of freedom from traditional restrictions. Some condemn this American exceptionalism, while others celebrate it. Don't take sides too quickly, (...) there are deep issues here. -/- -- The first lecture poses the question whether American identity is a rigid given set of traditional substantive values, or a free floating modern identity with at most a set of formal procedural values. -/- -- The second and third lectures dismantle these options, arguing that any substantive identity must include areas of inner freedom and mobility, and any formal procedural identity needs substantive style and content in order to exist at all. Personal and social identities are two leveled, with given values and projects plus inner self-reflection and space for revision. -/- -- The fourth lecture argues that what makes American identity special is neither its substantive values nor its modern formalism, which are shared with other modern nations, but rather the particular slant of its second level attitudes and practices towards first level substance. -/- -- The fifth lecture asks what America can learn and teach in an increasingly multicultural world. (shrink)

Samuel Kerstein’s recent (2013) How To Treat Persons is an ambitious attempt to develop a new, broadly Kantian account of what it is to treat others as mere means and what it means to act in accordance with others’ dignity. His project is explicitly nonfoundationalist: his interpretation stands or falls on its ability to accommodate our pretheoretic intuitions, and he does an admirable job of handling carefully a range of well fleshed out and sometimes subtle examples. In what follows, (...) I shall give a quick summary of the chapters and then say two good things about the book and one critical thing. (shrink)

Hegel, Heidegger, Postmodernity reconsidered after 20 years.

A discussion of whether Habermas as a representative modernist and Lyotard as a representative postmodern echo the ancient dispute between Plato and the Sophists. My conclusion is that they do not quite do so. Each is more complex and ancient dichotomy should be revised.

Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others’ mental control, (...) people self-project their own perceived mental control to anchor third-personal judgments about mental control and concomitant responsibility for negligent wrongdoing. In four experiments (N = 841), we tested whether perceptions of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that the ease with which people can counterfactually imagine an individual being non-negligent mediated the relationship between judgments of control and blame. Studies 2a and 2b indicated that perceived mental control has a strong effect on judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and that first-personal judgments of mental control are moderately correlated with third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Finally, we used an autobiographical memory manipulation in Study 3 to make personal episodes of forgetfulness salient. Participants for whom past personal episodes of forgetfulness were made salient judged negligent wrongdoers less harshly compared to a control group for whom past episodes of negligence were not salient. Collectively, these findings suggest that first-personal judgments of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and indicate a novel role for counterfactual thinking in the attribution of responsibility. (shrink)

Plato is mistaken on both sides of his distinction between Socrates and the Sophists. He imagines the Sophists to have a formless power that cannot be resisted. This exaltation of the power of persuasion needs to be seen as motivating excessive fears in various modern debates. Pragmatic approaches can lessen our fear.

A study timeshowing that the relation of time and timeless in greek philosophers was more nuanced and complex than is commonly thought.

A discussion of "postmodern" architecture in the sense in which the term was used in the late 1980s, namely, the introduction of historical substantive content and reference into architecture, disrupting the supposedly ahistorical purity of modernist architecture. Argues that postmodern use of history is really another version of the modern distance from history.

Scholarly hypertexts involve argument and explicit selfquestioning, and can be distinguished from both informational and literary hypertexts. After making these distinctions the essay presents general principles about attention, some suggestions for self-representational multi-level structures that would enhance scholarly inquiry, and a wish list of software capabilities to support such structures. The essay concludes with a discussion of possible conflicts between scholarly inquiry and hypertext.

In this paper, I will argue that there is a version of possibilism—inspired by the modal analogue of Kit Fine’s fragmentalism—that can be combined with a weakening of actualism. The reasons for analysing this view, which I call Modal Fragmentalism, are twofold. Firstly, it can enrich our understanding of the actualism/possibilism divide, by showing that, at least in principle, the adoption of possibilia does not correspond to an outright rejection of the actualist intuitions. Secondly, and more specifically, it can enrich (...) our understanding of concretism, by proving that, at least in principle, the idea that objects have properties in an absolute manner is compatible with transworld identity. (shrink)

Discussions of place and whom need to take more account of the multiplicity of centers in the modern city/suburban environment.

A discussion of how diggers stance with regard to contemporary analytic and Continental philosophy, with special emphasis on Heidegger's later works. The essay argues that Heidegger has now become attacks that people can interpret in many ways, and so is entered into dialogues which go against his own self-image of what he was about.

A discussion of the problem of creating unified places in a pluralistic multicultural society.

What can it mean to criticize when you are inside the work itself? In a immersive electronic or digital environment critic is not distanced on a platform based on firm principles. Yet criticism self-awareness and commentary remain possible. This essay examines various techniques for dealing with immersive environments critically.

The relation between nature and spirit in Hegel is not as simple as slogans such as "nature has no history" or a simple interior/exterior dichotonmy would suggest.

A critical examination of the different kinds of irony relevant to architecture, especially romantic and postmodern irony, and a suggestion for a less self-sure haughty kind of irony.

If we have no transparent access to our self, what kind of self-criticism is possible? Neither modernists nor postmodernists yet this pragmatic issue correct.

First part of a discussion about what kind of guidelines we can find in our group or cultural identity for our place making and architectural planning.

A discussion of the role of metaphor and reinterpretation in extending architectural vocabularies.

A discussion of how Hegel manages his classification and ordering of specific religions, and a critique of his method.

What does it take to settle an argument or debate, for the classical Greek philosophers, and how does this compare with our modern ideas about resolving disputes? Plato and Aristotle are not quite what they been reputed to be.

Despite what might seem to be the case, "Virtual" reality can be used to create fully "real" places with their own grammar and norms, where real events take place.

Argument and myth, historical figure and archetype, Socrates dominates our image of inquiry. How did this come about and should it continue?

This article challenges the association between realist methodology and ideals of legitimacy. Many who seek a more “realistic” or “political” approach to political theory replace the familiar orientation towards a state of justice with a structurally similar orientation towards a state of legitimacy. As a result, they fail to provide more reliable practical guidance, and wrongly displace radical demands. Rather than orienting action towards any state of affairs, I suggest that a more practically useful approach to political theory would directly (...) address judgments, by comparing the concrete possibilities for action faced by real political actors. (shrink)