In William Ockham on Metaphysics, Jenny E. Pelletier gives an account of Ockham's concept of metaphysics as the science of being and God as it emerges sporadically throughout his philosophical and theological work.

: The social model of disability gives us the tools not only to challenge the discrimination and prejudice we face, but also to articulate the personal experience of impairment. Recognition of difference is therefore a key part of the assertion of our common humanity and of an ethics of care that promotes our human rights.

Using a real-life case involving an accidental discovery of misattributed paternity as a springboard for discussion, I reflect on several practical and theoretical issues surrounding truth-telling in the doctor-patient relationship. I present the moral dilemma and identify arguments in favour of and against disclosure. I then examine the theoretical difficulties in balancing conflicting reasons and in establishing what constitutes the 'truth'. I conclude that withholding the information from the patients would be ethically permissible and, more generally, that honesty is not (...) always the best policy. (shrink)

The ever increasing ability of medical technology to reshape the human body in fundamental ways—from organ and tissue transplants to reconstructive surgery and prosthetics—is something now largely taken for granted. But for a philosopher, such interventions raise fundamental and fascinating questions about our sense of individual identity and its relationship to the physical body. Drawing on and engaging with philosophers from across the centuries, Jenny Slatman here develops a novel argument: that our own body always entails a strange dimension, a (...) strangeness that enables us to incorporate radical physical changes. (shrink)

The aim of this thematic literature review is to explore nurses' perceptions of ethical issues in the care of older people. Electronic databases were searched from September 1997 to September 2007 using specific key words with tight inclusion criteria, which revealed 17 primary research reports. The data analysis involved repeated reading of the findings and sorting of those findings into four themes. These themes are: sources of ethical issues for nurses; differences in perceptions between nurses and patients/relatives; nurses' personal responses (...) to ethical issues; and the patient—nurse relationship. The findings reveal that ageism is one of the major sources of the ethical issues that arise for nurses caring for older people. Education and organizational change can combat ageist attitudes. Wider training is required in the care of older people, workplace skills, palliative care and pain management for older people. The demands of a changing global demography will necessitate further research in this field. (shrink)

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us (...) new models to live by--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time--that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible. In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries--physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives--or the life of the planet--is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, "saving" time-recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature-could also mean that time saves us. (shrink)

Boorse’s biostatistical theory states that diseases should be defined in ways that reflect disturbances of biological function and that are objective and value free. We use three examples from contemporary medicine that demonstrate the complex issues that arise when defining the boundaries of disease: polycystic ovary syndrome, chronic kidney disease, and myocardial infarction. We argue that the biostatistical theory fails to provide sufficient guidance on where the boundaries of disease should be drawn, contains ambiguities relating to choice of reference class, (...) and is out of step with medical processes for identifying disease boundaries. Although proponents of the biostatistical theory might regard these practical issues as irrelevant to the aim of providing a theoretical account of disease, we take them to indicate the need for a theoretical account that is adequate for current needs—including limiting new forms of medicalization that are driven by the identification of disease based on dysfunction. Our processes for determining the boundaries for disease need to recognize that there is no value-free method for making these decisions. (shrink)

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

This special issue aims to spotlight the individual, lived experiences of caregivers and those receiving care–areas often overshadowed by clinical and medicalized narratives within clinical ethics. Our aim is to enrich the discourse by incorporating stories and narratives of medical care and challenge existing clinical practices by emphasizing patient and practitioner experiences. Through a blend of clinical and academic insights, this issue provides phenomenological narratives, highlighting the importance of lived experiences in understanding and improving clinical caregiving practices. The contributions, ranging (...) from theoretical analyses to personal narratives, explore various aspects of caregiving. Each article contributes to a deeper understanding of the phenomenologies of care, advocating for a more inclusive, patient-centered approach in clinical ethics and practice. (shrink)

"As a doctor, I make every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal, and life's inclination towards death begins as soon as the meridian is past."--C.G. Jung, commentary on The Secret of the Golden FlowerHere collected for the first time are Jung's views on death and immortality, his writings often coinciding with the death of the most (...) significant people in his life. The book shows many of the major themes running throughout the writings, including the relativity of space and time surrounding death, the link between transference and death, and the archetypes shared among the world's religions at the depths of the Self. The book includes selections from "On Resurrection," "The Soul and Death," "Concerning Rebirth," "Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead" from the Collected Works, "Letter to Pastor Pfafflin" from Letters, and "On Life after Death.". (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that to create a genomics that offers more gifts than weights, central attention must be paid to questions of justice. This will require expanding bioethical imaginations so that they grasp and can respond to questions of structural inequity. It will necessitate building novel coalitions and collaborations that turn the attention of bioethical governance away from narrow individual questions such as, “Do I consent?” and toward the broader collective question, is this just? What kind of lives (...) and collectivities are made possible? What rights and principles should govern them? The essay ends with one example of this novel coalition building arising from the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It draws lessons from this effort to build new alliances that bridge the social sciences and natural sciences, arts and engineering, to create new kinds of training and thinking that create a genomics that more adequately responds to fundamental questions of justice. (shrink)

The medical profession’s role should be limited to advice and informationThe medical establishment’s desire to interfere with the autonomous wishes of boxers seems at odds with the principle of respect for autonomy prevalent in contemporary biomedical practice. I argue that the role of the medical profession in boxing should be solely an advisory and informational one. In addition, the distinctions made between boxing and other high risk sports often rely on an insufficient knowledge of the sport. This leads to misdirected (...) criticisms and excessive emphasis on the colourful discourse of boxing, as opposed to the practice of boxing itself. Dr Herrera’s claim in his article that boxing differs from other sports in the acceptability of its acts outside the realm of sport is refuted.1 The importance of consent as a legitimising factor is highlighted, and a number of possible solutions to improve safety within the sport are tentatively suggested.In the United Kingdom, a competent adult may legally refuse medical treatment, irrespective of the severity of his condition or the validity of his reasons. With the pre-eminence of an autonomy based model of bioethics, respecting a patient’s wishes forms an integral part of acting in his best interests. It is puzzling, then, to find that the Australian Medical Association have called for a ban on boxing on the grounds that the activity is excessively hazardous to the health of boxers. The often mentioned principle of respect for autonomy is abandoned once the person drops the privileged title of “patient”. This suggests that being a patient …. (shrink)

The Greek word eoikos can be translated in various ways. It can be used to describe similarity, plausibility or even suitability. This book explores the philosophical exploitation of its multiple meanings by three philosophers, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato. It offers new interpretations of the way that each employs the term to describe the status of their philosophy, tracing the development of this philosophical use of eoikos from the fallibilism of Xenophanes through the deceptive cosmology of Parmenides to Plato's Timaeus. The (...) central premise of the book is that, in reflecting on the eoikos status of their accounts, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato are manipulating the contexts and connotations of the term as it has been used by their predecessors. By focusing on this continuity in the development of the philosophical use of eoikos, the book serves to enhance our understanding of the epistemology and methodology of Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato's Timaeus. (shrink)

Does the real difference between non-consequentialist and consequentialist theories lie in their approach to value? Non-consequentialist theories are thought either to allow a different kind of value (namely, agent-relative value) or to advocate a different response to value ('honouring' rather than 'promoting'). One objection to this idea implies that all normative theories are describable as consequentialist. But then the distinction between honouring and promoting collapses into the distinction between relative and neutral value. A proper description of non-consequentialist theories can only (...) be achieved by including a distinction between temporal relativity and neutrality in addition to the distinction between agent-relativity and agent-neutrality. (shrink)

I develop a theory of counterfactuals about relative computability, i.e. counterfactuals such as 'If the validity problem were algorithmically decidable, then the halting problem would also be algorithmically decidable,' which is true, and 'If the validity problem were algorithmically decidable, then arithmetical truth would also be algorithmically decidable,' which is false. These counterfactuals are counterpossibles, i.e. they have metaphysically impossible antecedents. They thus pose a challenge to the orthodoxy about counterfactuals, which would treat them as uniformly true. What’s more, I (...) argue that these counterpossibles don’t just appear in the periphery of relative computability theory but instead they play an ineliminable role in the development of the theory. Finally, I present and discuss a model theory for these counterfactuals that is a straightforward extension of the familiar comparative similarity models. (shrink)

For International Relations scholars, discussions of globalization inevitably turn to questions of sovereignty. How much control does a country have over its borders, people and economy? Where does that authority come from? _Sovereign Lives_ explores these changes through reading of humanitarian intervention, human rights discourses, securitization, refugees, the fragmentation of identities and the practices of development.

Braun explores the use of digital twin technology in medicine with a particular emphasis on the question of how such simulations can represent a person.1 In defining some first conditions for ethically justifiable forms of representation of digital twins, he argues that digital twins do not threaten an embodied person, as long as that person retains control over their simulated representation via dynamic consent, and ideally with the option to choose both form and usage of the simulation. His thoughtful elaboration (...) provides insight into the challenges inherent in interactions between a person and their digital twin, emphasising the modes of control required to respect personal modes of freedom. This individual-centric approach to the question of representation leaves out the important ethical consideration of ensuring that all, not merely some, can be represented. Braun describes dynamic consent as a necessary mode of control, arguing that where a person is unable to give consent, ‘such simulations threaten to become illegitimate representations. They would then shift the kind of interaction from representation to illegitimate forms of prediction or surveillance and thereby could lead to infringements to individual modes of freedom.’ Consequently, the implementation of digital twin technology in healthcare would seem to exclude the most vulnerable members of society from participation in and benefiting from medical innovation, …. (shrink)

The Handbook examines 34 philosophical thinkers, both those commonly linked to process thinking, such as Whitehead, Bergson and James, and those that are not as often addressed from a process perspective such as Dilthey and Tarde. Each chapter addresses the background and context of this thinker, their work, and the potential contribution to organization and management research.

This essay investigates the Zhuangzian theory of the self, which has long been the subject of a heated and controversial debate in Chinese intellectual history. According to an interpretation that has been quite prominent since the 1990s, the self in the Zhuangzi is a substantial, persisting self; it is a simple, basic object that is distinct from its properties. A substance, generally speaking, is an object or entity that has properties. Substance metaphysicians claim that substances, as primary units of reality, (...) are unchanging entities in themselves that bear changing properties over time.Some scholars, such as Kuang-ming Wu, Yi Wu, and Leo K. C. Cheung, believe that the self in... (shrink)

The frequency and severity of natural disasters and extreme weather events are increasing, taking a dramatic economic and relational toll on the communities they strike. Given the critical role that entrepreneurship plays in a community’s viability, it is necessary to understand how small business owners respond to these events and move forward over time. This study explores the long-term dynamics and trajectory of individuals within the broader business community following a natural disaster, paying particular attention to the influence of social (...) identity. Results suggest that the community identity changes over the course of recovery and rebuilding, underscoring the need for a holistic approach so that intervening agencies can achieve the sustainable economic recovery desired. (shrink)

This open access book presents an ethical approach to utilizing personal medical data. It features essays that combine academic argument with practical application of ethical principles. The contributors are experts in ethics and law. They address the challenges in the re-use of medical data of the deceased on a voluntary basis. This pioneering study looks at the many factors involved when individuals and organizations wish to share information for research, policy-making, and humanitarian purposes. -/- Today, it is easy to donate (...) blood or even organs, but it is virtually impossible to donate one’s own medical data. This is seen as ethically unacceptable. Yet, data donation can greatly benefit the welfare of our societies. This collection provides timely interdisciplinary research on biomedical big data. Topics include the ethics of data donation, the legal and regulatory challenges, and the current and future collaborations. -/- Readers will learn about the ethical and regulatory challenges associated with medical data donations. They will also better understand the special nature of using deceased data for research purposes with regard to ethical principles of autonomy, beneficence, and justice. In addition, the contributors identify the key governance issues of such a scheme. The essays also look at what we can learn in terms of best practice from existing medical data schemes. (shrink)

This Handbook presents key ideas of philosophers and social theorists whose ideas inform process approaches to organization studies. Each chapter addresses the background and context of this thinker, their work (with a focus on the processual elements), and the potential contribution to organization and management research.

Given his known predilection for ontological parsimony, Ockham’s ontology of artifacts is unsurprisingly reductionist: artifacts are nothing over and above their existing and appropriately ordered parts. However, the case of artifacts is notable in that they are real objects that human artisans produce by bringing about a real change: they spatially rearrange existing natural thing(s) or their parts for the sake of some end. This article argues that the human contribution to the nature and production of artifacts is two-fold: (1) (...) the artisan’s cognitive grasp of her expertise and her decision to deploy that expertise are the two efficient causes necessary to explain the existence of an artifact, and (2) the purpose that the artisan had in mind when she decided to make an artifact fixes the function(s) of the artifact such that an artisan’s purpose is the final cause necessary to explain what an artifact is. Artifacts indeed exist, owing what they are and that they are to intelligent and volitional human activity, which Ockham never denies. The article submits that a myopic focus on Ockham’s indisputable reductionism does not exhaust what is metaphysically interesting and relevant about artifacts. (shrink)

Case 1 reminds us that patients have duties too, while case 2 presents an instance of justified withholding of informationHow refreshing to read these two cases! No conjoined twins, fantastical chimeras, or other incredible scenarios at the fringes of medical reality. Each case highlights the practical and theoretical difficulties that doctors face in their everyday practice.Case 1: In case 1, the patient, who had declined an HIV test, changed his mind and requested an HIV test on the request form without (...) informing the doctor. The pathologist performed the tests and returned the results to the unsuspecting doctor, who duly investigated the matter. The doctor’s anxiety at the situation, as well as the worries of the entire practice and pathology laboratory, must have been deeply unpleasant. Thus the patient, no doubt unintentionally, caused much distress by requesting the HIV test. He was, at the very least, guilty of a lack of foresight and consideration. As a minimum, he should have informed the doctor of his last minute alteration. This would have enabled the doctor to discuss the implications of the test, to organise appropriate counselling, and, most importantly, to receive the results in full knowledge of the situation.As Dr Fraser points out, the experience of case 1 reinforces the importance of taking good medical notes. Even if the patient’s refusal had been documented in the notes, however, this would not have prevented him from requesting the HIV test, and indeed other tests, on the blood form. Pharmacists may still occasionally be faced with situations when they are unsure whether the doctor prescribed 10 capsules of a drug, or 110 capsules, as the patient may have added a “1” in front of the doctor’s original prescription. Similarly, how …. (shrink)

The public revelation in 2003 that medical students perform intimate examinations without patient consent has engendered much debate in the press and scientific journals. Using this case as a springboard for discussion, I will argue that medical schools should encourage students to raise their ethical concerns and call for a change of policy making it easier for students to do so. I will also address the question of medical students’ moral obligations towards their patients, and conclude that medical students ought (...) to express their discontent when faced with unethical practices or attitudes.In early January 2003, a study appeared in the British Medical Journal revealing that nearly a quarter of rectal and vaginal examinations on anaesthetised patients were performed by medical students without patient consent.1 Although the study did not generate the firestorm of controversy many expected, it engendered much discussion on ethical issues surrounding informed consent and patient autonomy, as well as stressing the need for greater ethics training for medical students. As an ethical problem, however, the case of intimate examinations is, to my mind, relatively uninteresting. If we agree that it is wrong for doctors to perform a vaginal examination on a conscious person without their consent, then it follows that it will still be …. (shrink)

Although telephone consultations are widely used in the delivery of healthcare, they are vulnerable to breaches of patient confidentiality. Current guidelines on telephone consultations do not address adequately the issue of confidentiality. In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem: a password system to control access to patient information. Authorised persons will be offered the option of selecting a password which they will use to validate their request for information over the telephone. This simple yet stringent method of (...) access control should improve security while allowing the continuing evolution of telephone consultations. (shrink)

Covering a broad range of approaches within critical theory including Marxism and post-Marxism, the Frankfurt School, hermeneutics, phenomenology, postcolonialism, feminism, queer theory, poststructuralism, pragmatism, scientific realism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, this book provides students with a comprehensive and accessible introduction to 32 key critical theorists whose work has been influential in the field of international relations.

This book will give unique insight into how a new generation of Bourdieusian researchers apply Bourdieu to contemporary issues. It will provide a discussion of the working mechanisms of thinking through and/or with Bourdieu when analysing data. In each chapter, individual authors discuss and reflect upon their own research and the ways in which they put Bourdieu to work. The aim of this book is not to just to provide examples of the development of Bourdieusian research, but for each author (...) to reflect on the ways in which they came across Bourdieu's work, why it speaks to them (including a reflexive consideration of their own background), and the way in which it is thus useful in their thinking. Many of the authors were introduced to Bourdieu's works after his death. The research problems which the individual authors tackle are contextualised in a different time and space to the one Bourdieu occupied when he was developing his conceptual framework. This book will demonstrate how his concepts can be applied as "thinking tools" to understand contemporary social reality. Throughout Bourdieu's career, he argued that sociologists need to create an epistemological break, to abandon our common sense - or as much as we can - and to formulate findings from our results. In essence, we are putting Bourdieu to work to provide a structural constructivist approach to social reality anchored through empirical reflexivity. (shrink)

In his 1998 book Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Lubomír Doležel put forth a theory of narrative fiction based on the interdisciplinary framework of possible worlds. In Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage, Doležel takes his earlier theory further and applies it to historiography as well, with the specific aim of showing how the study of history might be defended against the postmodern challenge via the use of possible worlds semantics. Doležel's book is essentially an argument against (...) the postmodern views expressed by Roland Barthes and Hayden White, who have claimed that fundamentally, there is no difference between fictional and historical narratives. According to Doležel, this difference can be saved if the focus of attention is shifted from the textual features of these narratives to the fictional or historical worlds that the narratives project.Doležel's comparison of fictional and historical worlds to each other is quite illuminating and thorough. However, the question remains whether the application of PW semantics does anything besides offering a detailed analysis of the structure of the different types of narrative worlds. After all, one should not overlook the perhaps more practical way of differentiating between historical and fictional narratives through their institutional status. Furthermore, we argue that by focusing on the properties of the end products, that is, the resulting narratives, Doležel concedes too much to postmodernists. A stronger way to give postmodernists a taste of their own medicine would be to argue that the rules that historians follow in the process of generating, constructing, and evaluating weighed causal explanations are fundamentally different from whatever rules govern the generation and construction of fiction. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the various meanings of embodiment from a patient’s perspective. Resorting to phenomenology of health and medicine, I take the idea of ‘lived experience’ as starting point. On the basis of an analysis of phenomenology’s call for bracketing the natural attitude and its reduction to the transcendental, I will explain, however, that in medical phenomenological literature ‘lived experience’ is commonly one-sidedly interpreted. In my paper, I clarify in what way the idea of ‘lived experience’ should be (...) revisited and, subsequently, what this reconsideration means for phenomenological research on embodiment in health and medicine. The insight that the body is a condition of possibility for world-disclosing yet, at the same time, itself conditioned by this world forces us to not only zoom in on the body’s subject-side, but also on its object-side. I argue that in order to render account for this double body ontology, phenomenology should include empirical sociological analyses as well. I thus argue in favor of the idea of a socio-phenomenology. Drawing on material from my own research project on embodied self-experiences after breast surgery, I show how this approach can be fruitful in interpreting the impact of disfigurements on a person’s embodied agency, or a person’s ‘I can’. (shrink)

The core idea of social constructivism in mathematics is that mathematical entities are social constructs that exist in virtue of social practices, similar to more familiar social entities like institutions and money. Julian C. Cole has presented an institutional version of social constructivism about mathematics based on John Searle’s theory of the construction of the social reality. In this paper, I consider what merits social constructivism has and examine how well Cole’s institutional account meets the challenge of accounting for the (...) characteristic features of mathematics, especially objectivity and applicability. I propose that in general social constructivism shows promise as an ontology of mathematics, because the view can agree with mathematical practice and it offers a way of understanding how mathematical entities can be real without conflicting with a scientific picture of reality. However, I argue that Cole’s specific theory does not provide an adequate social constructivist account of mathematics. His institutional account fails to sufficiently explain the objectivity and applicability of mathematics, because the explanations are weakened and limited by the three-level theoretical model underlying Cole’s account of the construction of mathematical reality and by the use of the Searlean institutional framework. The shortcomings of Cole’s theory give reason to suspect that the Searlean framework is not an optimal way to defend the view that mathematical reality is socially constructed. (shrink)