Canadian Philosopher Research Articles

Remaining in the nursing profession: The relevance of strong evaluations.

Why nurses remain in the profession is a complex question. However, strong values can be grounds for their remaining, meaning nurses evaluate the qualitative worth of different desires and distinguish between senses of what is a good life. The overall aim is to explore and argue the relevance of strong evaluations for remaining in the nursing profession. This theoretical article based on a hermeneutical approach introduces the concept strong evaluations as described by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and provides examples of nurses' experiences in everyday nursing care drawn from a Norwegian empirical study. Data collected in the original study consisted of qualitative interviews and qualitative follow-up interviews with 13 nurses. The research context was the primary and secondary somatic and psychiatric health service, inside as well as outside institutions. The article uses data from an original empirical study approved by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services. Information was given and consent obtained from the participants. Remaining in the nursing profession can be understood as revolving around being a strong evaluator. This has been concretized in issues of being aware of different incidents in life and having capacities as a nurse. Why nurses remain is discussed in relation to how nurses have shaped themselves by reflecting on what is of significance in their life. However, being a strong evaluator cannot be seen as the casual condition for remaining. Remaining in the nursing profession is obviously not a contingent matter, rather it is a matter concerned with the qualitative worth of different desires and values. Nurses' awareness of a life choice impacts on whether they remain or not. Consequently, nurses may need to articulate and reflect on their priorities for remaining.

Contractarian Libertarianism of Jan Narveson. Is It Still Libertarianism?

This chapter aims at presenting and scrutinizing a contractarian approach to libertarianism, which has been proposed by a Canadian philosopher, Jan Narveson, known as the main proponent of so-called contractarian libertarianism. The chapter begins with the short introduction followed by “Assumptions,” discussing Narveson’s understanding of morality, his critique of Rawlsian methodology and his view on natural law and natural rights. Afterwards, “Social contract: justification, procedure, motives” presents such elements in the philosophy of Narveson as advantages of contractarianism, levels of the social contract and its status, as well as motives of parties being subject to the social contract. The third part, entitled “Critics vs. Narveson” touches on a critical discussion of the subject by other theorists (Tibor R. Machan, John T. Sanders, Leo Groarke). The last section, “Is the Contractarianism of Narveson Libertarianism?” presents the thesis that Narveson’s contractarianism is not a justified basis of libertarianism. Albeit he comes to conclusions agreeable to libertarianism, his philosophy is better labeled as laissez-faire.

Phantom Public

In 1964 the enigmatic Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously declared “the medium is the message.” At the same time he called media “extensions of man.” Fifty years ago these assertions were provocative enough to turn McLuhan into a countercultural celebrity. Today, it all seems somewhat unremarkable: who doesn’t feel their smartphone, for both better and worse, to be a part of them? The idea that media extend us—making us more connected and sociable, informed and empowered—is not just pervasive; it is essential to the promotion of the digital economy, or what theorist Jodi Dean has dubbed “communicative capitalism.”

Limit or liberation Ellen Key’s view on religious education in school

The Swedish author Ellen Key (1849-1926) argued, in her time and from her idealistic and modern perspective, for a disconnection between the educational system at schools and the authorities of the State Church of Sweden. Meanwhile, in her pedagogical manifest The Century of the Child (1900/1912) she promoted a deeper encounter between the pupil and the textual stories of the bible. Not as fundaments for theology and a systematic structure of belief, but as an important contribution for the growth of the child. The article takes it’s point of departure from the historical context of Ellen Key’s time, the educational and political-religious framework where Key’s visionary ideals developed and were formulated. Furthermore, Key’s arguments and demands in The Century of the Child for the exclusion of Christian instruction in schools, as well as her perception of the implication on the educational practice, is detailed. Key’s texts will be analyzed through the methodical and theoretical works of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1931 - ). In his work Taylor investigates the possibility to view the world in “excarnated” or “incarnated” terms, and Ellen Key’s arguments are sharpened in this classical theological and philosophical structure. In the conclusion the over-arching question is: will religious instruction in general and Christian instruction in particular, in Key’s opinion, create problems or possibilities for the child in its upbringing? Will they serve as limit or as liberation for the development of the individual?

El fenómeno religioso entendido desde la apertura a la trascendencia: ¿posibilidad o límite? Una mirada crítica desde el pensamiento de Charles Taylor

There are different ways to understand and to define religion. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor —who has been working the religious phenomenon during the last years— has tried to define religion through transcendence. This definition is not exempt of difficulties and critics: one of them focuses on the idea that religion proposes too high human ideals such as asceticism, mortification or the renounce to the ordinary objectives of human life. The second critic focuses on the idea that religion is not able to assume and recognize violence and conflict as a very important aspect in human kind. Thus, religion tends to expurgate it from reality. This article will give an overview of these critics and which can be the main ways to answer them.

Uncertainty and objectivity in clinical decision making: a clinical case in emergency medicine.

The evidence-based practice and evidence-based medicine (EBM) movements have promoted standardization through guideline development methodologies based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of best available research. EBM has challenged clinicians to question their reliance on practical reasoning and clinical judgement. In this paper, we argue that the protagonists of EBM position their mission as reducing uncertainty through the use of standardized methods for knowledge evaluation and use. With this drive towards uniformity, standardization and control comes a suspicion towards intuition, creativity and uncertainty as integral parts of medical practice. We question the appropriateness of attempts to standardize professional practice through a discussion of the importance of uncertainty. Greenhalgh’s taxonomy of uncertainty is used to inform an analysis of the clinical reasoning occurring in a potentially life threatening emergency situation with a young patient. The case analysis is further developed by the use of the Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan’s theory about understanding and objective knowing. According to Lonergan it is not by getting rid of or even by reducing uncertainty, but by attending systematically to it and by relating to it in a self-conscious way, that objective knowledge can be obtained. The paper concludes that uncertainty is not a regrettable and unavoidable aspect of decision making but a productive component of clinical reasoning.

Charles Taylor and the Political Recognition of Difference as a Resource for Theological Reflection on Religious Recognition

Abstract This paper argues for a wider presentation of the term ‘recognition’ that includes ‘religion’ as a dimension of recognition. Toward this end, the author draws on the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, who considered whether religion might be a supportive context for the promotion of recognition. Recognition for Taylor includes recognition not only of sameness, but, significantly, recognition of difference. As the author of this paper highlights, Taylor’s argument for recognition of difference is an important resource in any theological reflection on the possibility of religious recognition.

Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age by John Fletcher

Reviewed by: Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age by John Fletcher Jay Ball Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age. By John Fletcher. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 412 pp. $44.00 cloth. Part ethnography, part polemic, John Fletcher’s new book provides a landmark survey of contemporary American evangelicalism’s vibrant culture of performance. It is also a provocation addressed to “secular Left” scholars who might (falsely) believe they have cornered the market in theatre for social change. These two themes—the range and sophistication of evangelical performance versus the smug hypocrisy and dismissiveness of antitheistic critics—form the double helix of Fletcher’s well-researched and closely observed study. It deserves to be widely read and debated. As the lengthy introduction explains, Fletcher sets out to identify and categorize the array of performance strategies that “evangelicals in the United States use to change their world, to win converts to their faith and worldview” (5). Fletcher places particular emphasis on “the challenges they face, and the solutions, innovations, or compromises they create” in the context of a society whose norms are regarded as increasingly antireligious and tolerant of difference, that is, the “secular age” of his title, which he takes from the Canadian philosopher of identity Charles Taylor (5). Structured as eight lengthy chapters, Fletcher covers everything from traditional door-to-door “soul winning” (or “kerygmatic” performatives) to alternative Halloween immersive theatres known as “Hell Houses,” from Ken Ham’s Kentucky-based Creation Museum to “seeker-sensitive [Church] services” pioneered by Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. Fletcher also discusses evangelical debates about “sexual orientation change efforts,” also known as “conversion therapy,” in the penultimate chapter of the book. In most of these case studies, Fletcher’s rhetorical criticism is grounded in firsthand “thick descriptions” based on his wide-ranging fieldwork. But Fletcher is no disinterested observer on these travels. Eschewing “paranoid criticism,” which he defines as the reflexive ascription of “hegemonic ideologies” to anything but the most politically radical practices, he instead adopts the perspective of “critical generosity,” or the “good faith” approach (29). Drawing on scholars of activist performance such as Jan Cohen-Cruz and David Roman, Fletcher seeks to employs “deep empathy” with American evangelicals in order to render their aims and methods with greater nuance and complexity. (For a work that engages so many theorists so well, it may seem ungenerous to wish Fletcher had employed others. However, one cannot help but wonder how [End Page 323] he might have engaged with Michael Walzer’s notion of “connected criticism.”) Further, this challenge to the values of left-progressive theatre historiography is intended to lift “significant limitations on the critical and political imaginations of theatre and performance activist-scholars” (29). Fletcher demonstrates that evangelicals are social-change innovators whose practices are worthy of admiration and possibly even theft. The chapter “Hell and Judgment: House of Distinction” may be the strongest application of this method for the way in which it complicates the premise that all evangelical performance is “preaching to convert.” Originally devised by Colorado pastor Keenan Roberts during the 1990s and now circulated nationally through so-called Outreach Kits (sold for $299), the typical “Hell House” stages a procession of harrowing tableaux depicting the wages of sin, especially teenage forms of moral misadventure: fatal drunk-driving accidents, drug overdoses, rape, abortion, and demonic possessions brought on by dabbling in the occult, all of which consign the victims to the just torments of hell. As Fletcher records, Roberts’s original has inspired numerous variants, including Judgment House, Revelation Walk, and Rapture House. According to Fletcher, all of these productions create what he memorably terms “interactive eschatological theatre” (160). However, in one of the more important takeaways from this study, Fletcher problematizes the notion that Hell Houses are designed to interpellate the unconverted. Drawing on Baz Kershaw’s theory of “authentication” in community-based theatre, Fletcher writes, “In order to ‘work,’ Hell House relies on an audience of people willing to buy into (authenticate) the picture of reality that Hell House presents. For those who do not already believe in demons or God or the...

Justice Could Be Highlighted in the Perspective of Historical Materialism

How to understand the relationship between historical materialism and Marx’s idea of justice? The well-know Canadian philosopher, Kai Nielsen, “who is indeed closer to Marxist moralism in substantive conclusion, but, methodologically speaking, it is more in the spirit of Marxist immoralism” (Nielsen,1987: p. 114), points out Marx’s ideological system is not a valueless theory of science and society, and the facts and value judgments can be unified in Marx’s theory. Nielsen reveals the profound idea of justice as the basic dimension of historical materialism, and the internal unity of fact judgment and value judgment in a dual dimensions, based on the perspective of historical materialism, showing “justice could be highlighted in the perspective of historical materialism”.

Vehículos de significación y transformación de la cultura universitaria en Latinoamérica / Vehicles of meaning and transformation of university culture in Latin America

This essay is based on the assumption that in order to reform higher education and face the challenges of this change of epoch it is necessary to transform not only teaching practices and organizational structures, but also university culture. So in order to point towards an authentic reform of the university, the analysis and consequent vehicles of meaning proposed by Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan are relevant: the intersubjective environment of university, the art that surrounds university life, the language characterizing teacher discourse, the symbols of university tradition and the persons involved in daily life of university classrooms. From the proposal of the seven complex lessons for the education of the future by Edgar Morin (2001), this work provides a matrix that describes some elements for the transformation of vehicles of meaning needed to change university culture in Latin America and may be useful as a research tool to inquire about these elements.

Unpacking the process of interpretation in evidence-based decision making.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has promoted the conscientious and systematic use of the best available scientific evidence in clinical decision making [1]. From an EBM point of view, only experimental evidence, especially results from randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses of trial results, count as strong evidence. Experiential evidence based upon expert opinion is classified as weak and placed at the bottom of the evidence hierarchy. EBM is often contrasted with traditional clinical medicine which considered pathophysiological reasoning and expert knowledge as the principal sources of clinical decision making. In a recently published article in Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, Jeannette Hofmeijer describes EBM as a revision of medical epistemology and points to the neglected role of expert opinion and the lack of focus on the principles of reasoning underpinning EMB [2]. More specifically, she shows how EBM involves important processes of interpretation. Hofmeijer is mainly concerned with the role of interpretation in the production of scientific knowledge within the EBM tradition, and she illustrates how the quest for evidence relies upon interpretation both in formulating a hypothesis and in accepting the accumulated evidence as sufficient. We will argue a related but still different perspective demonstrating the principles of reasoning involved in the integration of experimental and experiential knowledge in clinical decisions and the role of interpretation in this respect. The goal of EBM is, according to Sackett et al., the integration of (1) clinical experience and expertise; (2) scientific evidence; and (3) patient values and preferences to provide high-quality services [1]. However, a weakness of EBM is the lack of guidance on how to combine the main knowledge components of the model. The EBM literature says little about how to create a fruitful interaction between research, clinical expertise and patient preferences. Although the principal aim of EBM is to promote more conscientious and systematic clinical decision making, an important element of the model remains black boxed: the principles of reasoning according to which the different knowledge sources are combined. This paper aims to make explicit the often implicit interpretational work involved when scientific evidence, clinical expertise and patient preferences are combined. We believe that better awareness about this process of interpretation can promote better and more trustworthy decision making. Lack of individualization is a recurrent criticism against EBM [3,4]. Randomized clinical trials measure average effects and do not necessarily match the local and complex situation of the individual patient [5]. The need for a situated, practice-based reasoning has been argued, and concepts such as clinical intuition [6], tacit knowledge [7], wisdom [8] and collectively defined ‘mind lines’ [9] have been introduced to challenge a unilateral focus on implementing research evidence. More recently, the literature on patient-centred medicine and shared decision making has emphasized the importance of involving patients in medical decisions and suggested useful methods and approaches [10,11]. In spite of these attempts, the principles of reasoning according to which the knowledge sources are combined and applied are still poorly understood. There are few, if any, models and concepts available which make explicit the interpretational operations involved when combining and applying the knowledge components. We intend to throw light on this process by drawing on a four-step model of knowing developed by the Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan [12].

Introduction: What Is Lyric Philosophy?

What is lyric philosophy? The clearest response to that question is the book-length investigation by Canadian philosopher and poet Jan Zwicky. If philosophy can be defined as thinking in love with clarity, then lyric philosophy might be roughly understood as such thinking in which clarity assumes the form of resonance. Among her paradigmatic lyric philosophers, Zwicky includes (inter alia) the aphorists Herakleitos and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Lyric is distinguished by its deep structure, which is polydimensional and integrative. Epistemically, this structure responds to the gestural root of meaning, which is ineffably manifest in the physical world.

ZYGON @ 50: HALF A CENTURY OF ZYGON: JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE

<i>ZYGON @</i> 50: HALF A CENTURY OF <i>ZYGON: JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE</i>

“This is our Alabama”: Racial Segregation, Discrimination, and Violence in Tamio Wakayama's &lt;em&gt;Signs of Life&lt;/em&gt;

This essay examines the civil rights photography of Tamio Wakayama. In 1963, Wakayama, a twenty-year-old Japanese Canadian philosophy student, left the University of Western Ontario and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). A self-taught photographer, he shot pictures of SNCC’s grassroots organizing activities in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Upon returning to Canada, Wakayama became the photographer for the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA). In 1965 and 1966, he toured Canada taking pictures of SUPA’s community empowerment projects in urban slums and on reservations. The majority of photographs collected in Wakayama’s first photography book, Signs of Life (1969), come from his time as a field photographer for SNCC and SUPA. In this essay, I argue that Wakayama’s representations of race in Signs of Life encourage his audience to see civil rights activists’ demands for meaningful racial reform and redress as both legitimate and urgently necessary. Wakayama’s photographs of African American and Native struggles against racial segregation’s material and psychological effects reveal the US South and Canada’s shared histories of racialized dispossession, dehumanization, and discrimination.

Media psychology: Modern man and nonlocality of psyche

IntroductionThe relatively new concept of psychology[1] is steadily gaining ground in modern science, as well as in the minds of researchers, despite skepticism on the part of those who are used to the division of into the traditional branches, one of which is the of mass communication. However, more and more scientists are beginning to realize that psychology is not just a buzzword or a handy term but the name of a new phenomenological field, which goes beyond the boundaries of traditional classifications and concepts. In the past several decades, it has become clear that none of the existing disciplines can give a satisfactory answer to such questions as What is mass communication as such? and What are the patterns of its development? problem is that every time, depending on the position of the researcher, mass communication turns out to have different qualities and appears either to be in the technological or psycho-phenomenological sphere. It is impossible to limit ones research to only one approach because the accountability and controllability of technological processes are nullified by the intangibility and polyvalence of psychological processes, and psychological phenomena make complex causative links with technological ones. more advanced the communicative technologies are, the more unpredictable man's reaction is. Thus, attempts to control information flows lead to psychodynamic social processes going out of control and, in contrast, free stochastic communication leads to the processes becoming more streamlined. No sound explanation for the paradoxical phenomena of controllability / unpredictability, conditionality / spontaneity, openness / impermeability has been given so far. It seems as if we are dealing with an antinomy that cannot be resolved in the framework of the traditional linear-discrete model of mass communication, which implies the opposition of the speaker and the recipient, cause and effect, means and content. first man to go beyond the linear way of thinking typical of people working in this field was the Canadian philosopher and researcher M.McLuhan who expressed the essence of his ideas in the well-known formula The medium is the message (McLuhan, 1965), and even in the more defiant and seemingly illogical thesis The medium is the massage (McLuhan, 1967).Fifty years later, we see that the industrial era has given way to a digital age, which proves that McLuhans words were not a play on words but a clue, the elementary algorithm of the new paradigm of thinking created by mass communication itself. There is no doubt that electronic technologies have facilitated new thinking and the emergence of a new man and that people who lived in the days that the new technologies were introduced are different from those who see and hear the world through them today.The electronic mass media have changed the psycho-technique of perception, thinking and behavior and expanded man's mental abilities. Within the global information processes, mans thinking has acquired new qualities that could be defined as net-thinking[2]. It is a special form of psyche, rather independent and self- contained, with its own phenomena, paradoxes and system of self-regulation.Until recently, these phenomena were not considered to be a subject for serious scientific study, leaving only bold guesses, hearsay and much vagueness. Scientific publications were full of new terms, such as internet-dependence, virtual reality, virtual self (Gumanitarnye..., 2000), which marked, similar to milestones, flashes of research enthusiasm every time a new fact was discovered. However, most of the academic community looked on them as simply local phenomena that did not affect the existing system of concepts and the structure of knowledge.A global digital space, with its unprecedented possibilities, opened up so suddenly and without fanfare that, at first, nobody realized that a transition to a new stage in the development of science had occurred. …

Prospects for African Canadian Philosophy

Prospects for African Canadian Philosophy

On the teachings of George Grant

One of Canada’s greatest public intellectuals, George Grant (1918–1988) studied history as an undergraduate, focusing on concepts and themes rather than minutiae. That same intellectual disposition surfaced later at Oxford, where he had gone on a Rhodes scholarship to study law. Returning to Oxford after the war, he left law to study theology, earning extra money by writing historical articles on Canada for Chambers’ Encyclopedia. Even after becoming the most prominent Canadian philosopher of his time, Grant maintained he always thought like an historian. Reactivating the historical thinking of George Grant can encourage ‘becoming historical’.

The Fevered Novel from Balzac to Bernanos: Frenetic Catholicism in Crisis, Delirium and Revolution

This monograph is an important and compelling account of a novelistic tradition that stretches from Georges Bernanos back to Balzac, by way of Léon Bloy, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Barbey d'Aurevilly. Depending on a master plot that evokes Maistrean themes of blood, sacrifice, and redemption, working in a feverish female body, this canon combines Romantic freneticism and anti-Enlightenment religion to create a compound that Francesco Manzini calls ‘frenetic Catholicism’. The theme of fever, Manzini tells us, was commented on by Huysmans in writing about Barbey d'Aurevilly. When André Gide read Bernanos's Sous le soleil de Satan, he dismissed it as a rehash of Bloy and Barbey. In this present work Manzini aims to make us aware once more of the gradually intensifying themacity of fever in writings more usually classed in theologo-literary categories. His analysis encompasses (though is not restricted to) Balzac's Ursule Mirouët, Barbey d'Aurevilly's Un prêtre marié, Huysmans's En rade, Bloy's Le Désespéré and La Femme pauvre, and Bernanos's Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette. Thus, as Manzini argues in his conclusion, between the freneticism of the Romantics and that of the surrealists this corpus represents an intermediary wave of freneticism, foregrounding fever, hyperconsciousness, dreamlike episodes, and female automatism. Manzini's knowledge of, and ease amidst, the sources is constantly impressive. Much like Richard Griffiths before him (The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–1914 (London: Constable, 1966)), he has read both the bad novels and the good ones. For that we are in his debt. His commentary thrives on the oddities of his subjects. He points quite rightly to the peculiar hubris of writers whose contempt for the secular excesses of scientism leads them down a cul-de-sac of primitive medical quackery. Likewise, he underlines how Zola's attempt to unwrite Barbey — exorcising the former's anti-Romantic animus, as much as scratching his anticlerical itch — leads him to recapitulate Barbey's religious authoritarianism in the secular vernacular of patriarchy. Les espèces qui se rapprochent se mangent, to paraphrase Bernanos (Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune). In spite of all Manzini's tightly organized analysis, however, this reader wonders whether the fevered novel ‘best allowed contemporaries — and now […] literary critics and historians — to imagine the issues at stake in the amorphous scientistic, religious, and political debates’ of the period (p. 17). Below the ideological clashes of nineteenth-century science and religion, the two contending dynamics of anthropocentrism and theocentrism are attested and, it can be argued, even more perfectly dramatized in other Catholic literature (Charles Péguy's poetry, for example). In these terms, what distinguishes the Catholic frenetics from their Romantic or surrealist counterparts is that their fevered subject represents an attempt to build a road out of what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls ‘buffered’ individuality, and back towards the theocentric porous subject who is open to divine influence. By way of minor corrections, nuns do not take holy orders (p. 94) but make religious profession by taking vows. Also, the last Eucharistic host is not extreme unction (p. 119) but viaticum.

The Ethics of Excellence in Tourism Research

This article examines the challenges that have emerged in tourism as a result of the new audit culture, and the effects this system is having on the creation of knowledge. A premium is now being placed on quantifying just about every type of output in our efforts to rank one agent or entity against another: people, programs, journals, disciplines, and so on. This analysis departs from other works on the topic through the use of philosophy, and in particular, the work of the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul. Saul’s thoughts on corporatism, instrumental reason, utilitarianism, and knowledge are fundamental to the situation we find ourselves in at present. I argue, as Saul does, for a return to content over structure and form. Although working within these systems may be beneficial to some scholars and their programs and universities, the practice is not helping to build a cohesive and well-organized field.

Do We Need African Canadian Philosophy?

I ask whether we need African Canadian philosophy and attempt to provide an answer by considering a series of other questions that can be understood as alternative versions of the initial question. I ask (1) whether we need African Canadian philosophers; (2) whether we need philosophy focused on the African Canadian experience; (3) whether we already have African Canadian philosophy; (4) whether anybody of any background can do African Canadian philosophy; and (5) what African Canadian philosophy will do for us. I conclude that we do need African Canadian philosophy.