Intellectual Questions Research Articles

The Ethics of Creating and Responding to Doubts about Death Criteria

Expressing doubts about death criteria can serve healthy purposes, but can also cause a number of harms, including decreased organ donation rates and distress for donor families and health care staff. This paper explores the various causes of doubts about death criteria-including religious beliefs, misinformation, mistrust, and intellectual questions-and recommends responses to each of these. Some recommended responses are relatively simple and noncontroversial, such as providing accurate information. However, other responses would require significant changes to the way we currently do business. Policymakers should establish minimum national standards for determining death to foster a trustworthy system; academics and publishers have a duty to publish only materials that substantially engage and advance the debate to minimize the harm caused by divided expert opinion; and opposition to the dead donor rule should be conceptually separated from doubts about death criteria.

The Challenge of Self-Governance in Complex Contemporary Environments

The Challenge of Self-Governance in Complex Contemporary Environments Elinor Ostrom The ideas used to view the world by academics, officials, and citizens affect what they see, the improvements they think are feasible, and the means they presume can be used to reform the world. Ideas seem to be ephemeral, but their results are the artifacts of the world: the cities, the monuments, the wars, the suffering, and all the activities of human beings as they go about their everyday world. Human conceptions can be emancipatory. They may include vistas of untapped capabilities and enable individuals to improve their own and others' welfare. Or they may be conservative—closely guarding the achievements of the past and protecting the storehouse of acquired social knowledge from wanton destruction. Or worse, ideas may be restrictive or even retrogressive—limiting the horizon of what is possible, leading to a destruction of social infrastructure, and reducing the possibilities for human development. At the current time, the presumptions underlying most modes of policy analysis restrict, far more than is necessary, our view of human capabilities for self-governance (Ostrom 2008b). In an era when human rationality is thought of in terms that involve almost superhuman capabilities in some domains, it is paradoxical that the human capacity for self-reflective thought and social artisanship is almost entirely ignored. In the [End Page 316] policy sciences evolving from economics, game theory, political science, and decision theory, the individual is frequently modeled as possessing complete information about his or her environment, a clearly ordered set of goals, and the internal computational skills to find global optima in complex and difficult worlds. These sophisticated calculators are, however, presumed to have the foresight of the proverbial ostrich. Individuals are modeled as focusing exclusively on the choices available to them in a proximate situation without any capability to change the constraints of that situation. It is obviously the case that individuals do face many situations over which they have little or no control, at least in the short run. It is also obvious that human beings, faced with perverse situations, try either to avoid them or to change them. In the models used by many policy analysts, only an external actor—the government or the social planner—is perceived as having the capabilities of changing the structure of situations that lead to undesirable outcomes. Upon finding such situations, the contemporary analyst rarely asks what the individuals could do. Rather, the analyst asks what the government should do.1 In this article, I will first present a short review of the origins of contemporary theories of individual choice in contrast to the earlier theories of organic society. Next, I will address the application of these approaches to the analysis of nonprivate goods. The "tragedy of the commons" was until recently broadly accepted by scholars and policy analysts. Many common-pool resources represent highly complex environments for anyone—either government officials or local users—to understand. Many local communities have, however, developed institutions for self-governance of these resources. In the final section, I will address what we have learned from research on self-governance of complex common-pool resources. The Development of Theories of Individual Choice In contrast with earlier organic conceptions of human order, the individualistic perspective of modern choice theory is a liberating force. The presumption that there exists a social organism above the individual whose benefit must be served by all has led to much violence, bloodshed, and suffering. If the choice of perspectives were simply between the current, dominant conception of individual choice theories and an organic conception of society, no question exists in my mind which view is theoretically more [End Page 317] powerful for explaining empirical phenomena as well as philosophically more liberating. My feet are firmly planted in the terrain inhabited by theories that view the individual as a basic valuing entity. Once oriented in terms of that broad epistemological and metaphysical divide, however, we should recognize that the current analytical tools used in many individualistic theories were formed and adapted in the effort to explain human behavior in one particular arena—the competitive market related to strictly private goods. Here, the driving intellectual questions during...

In response to: Pesut B. & Johnson J. (2008) Reinstating the ‘Queen’: understanding philosophical inquiry in nursing. Journal of Advanced Nursing61(1), 115–121

As a first year PhD in Nursing Science student, I was extremely pleased to see an article stressing the importance of philosophy in the discipline of nursing. Pesut’s & Johnson’s JAN paper titled ‘Reinstating the ‘Queen’: understanding philosophy inquiry in nursing’ provided an excellent introduction to the characteristics of philosophy inquiry. One of the first required classes in the PhD programme at the University of Washington is ‘Philosophical Basis of Nursing Inquiry’. The purpose of the course is to provide an overview and critical analysis of historical and contemporary views of knowledge development and of science, with particular emphasis on the way these views influence approaches to nursing inquiry. The focus of the course is on analysing underlying epistemological and ontological assumptions and the implications of diverse approaches to knowledge generation in nursing. Unfortunately, I feel the authors are undervaluing the efforts currently being done by nurse scientists because their work is labelled as theory-focused and not philosophy-focused. The authors focus on the ‘tools’ of a philosopher as a way to examine philosophical issues in nursing, as if these ‘tools’ are novel methods unique to philosophy and currently absent in the discipline of nursing. But that is simply not the case. Chinn and Kramer (2008) define philosophy as ‘a form of disciplined inquiry that discerns the nature of reality and of knowledge and knowing’ (p. 184). The hallmark of philosophical thinking is the use of logic and reasoning, rather than empiric evidence, to create knowledge (Chinn & Kramer 2008). That is exactly what the early nurse theorists did. The intellectual questions a nursing scientist must ask while conducting a concept exploration, concept analysis, concept development and theory development are the same questions asked while attempting explore philosophical issues in nursing. In both the sitiuations, nurse scientists examine the nature of the problem, look to reveal assumptions or potential distortions, and attempt to clarify views. If the end product is reached through the use of logic and reason, then what difference does it make if it is labelled as a ‘nursing theory’ and not as a ‘nursing philosophy’? As William Shakespeare (2004) wrote in 1595,

For Canada's Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (review)

Reviewed by: For Canada's Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s David B. Marshall Gary Miedema . For Canada's Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s. McGill-Queen's University Press 2005. 340. $70.00 Before the 1970s, historians of Canadian religious history wrote about church–state relations. That approach has been rejected in favour of social and intellectual questions on the role of religion in Canadian life and more recently how religion has intersected with gender, race, and class. Questions of religion and national identity that engaged the 'national school' have faded. Church–state questions, however, are again attracting the attention of historians. But the focus is being redefined as religion and the public square. In this book, the author looks at 'how public expressions of religion (including Christian and non-Christian faiths) shed light on the subtle relationship between religious and national identities in Canada in the 1960s.' Miedema's book is a return to older questions about religion, the churches, and national identity, but the approach is highly innovative. He analyzes the public expression of religion during Canada's centennial celebrations in 1967 and at Expo 67 held in Montreal. Miedema situates Canada's centennial in the midst of a convulsive period for religion and the churches in Canada. He follows the recent work of Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (1988) and Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (2001), both of whom argue that the most profound changes in religion occurred in the era after the Second World War and especially the 1960s. Miedema also picks up from John Webster Grant in his classic 1972 book, The Church in the Canadian Era, where he characterized the 1960s in Canada's churches as a 'decade of ferment.' The secularization debate that has engaged and divided historians of Canada over the last two decades has come down to a question of timing. This new research about the 1960s is convincing, but it does not discount the historians arguing that a long process of secularization has been underway since the Victorian age. The dramatic restructuring of religious life that occurred in the 1960s, so skilfully outlined in this book, is part of an immensely complicated non-linear process, in which the 1960s is a crucial period but not the only one. [End Page 407] Despite the difficulties faced by Canada's historic mainstream churches in the 1960s, Miedema is emphatic that religion has a definite and important public presence in Canadian society. He draws on a detailed analysis of the ceremonies during the centennial year, and especially the centennial hymns and prayers, in order to demonstrate this point. He not only analyzes the content of the hymns and prayers but also provides a fine description of the events in which these 'texts' of civil religion were proclaimed. Nevertheless, religion in Canada was no longer uncontested. The public square was becoming crowded with a growing and well-organized conservative evangelical movement and with an increasingly diverse number of non-Christian religions. Attempts to create an ecumenical movement around the planning of a singular religious pavilion at Expo 67 failed. In the end, there were three pavilions at Expo 67: the Christian Pavilion, Sermons from Science sponsored by the evangelical movement, and the Pavilion of Judaism, which reflected the more complicated and contested multi-faith landscape of modern Canada. Miedema's superb descriptions of each pavilion provides the reader with a detailed, 'you are there' feeling. Miedema 'walks' the reader through each pavilion from the outside surroundings through the doors and then past the displays and performances. This detailed descriptive analysis is a model of how historians should 'read' public celebrations and material culture. No church or religious tradition was dominant by the 1960s. According to the census, the category 'no religion' was the nation's fastest growing religion. Canada could no longer be assumed to be a Christian country; it was entering the post-Christian age. The contested nature of religion in Canadian society was also experienced within the traditional or historic mainstream churches. Miedema's analysis suggests that the historic Canadian churches...

A Notably Absent Mind

September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd 74 Reviews A NOTABLY ABSENT MIND Michael D. Stevenson Schulich School of Business, York U. / Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. Toronto, on m3j 1p3 / Hamilton, on l8s 4m2, Canada stevenm@mcmaster.ca Stefan Collini. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 2006. Pp. x, 526. isbn 0–19-929105–5. £25.00; us$45.00. Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds provides an intriguing analysis of the question of intellectuals in Britain during the twentieth century, examining “the ways in which the existence, nature, and role of intellectuals have been thought about and argued over” (p. 1) and addressing the popular notion that British intellectuals have been “peculiarly unimportant or even non-existent” (p. 3). For the most part, Collini convincingly demonstrates that this “absence thesis” is without merit and that Britain has enjoyed a distinguished tradition of intellectual activity , even in relation to countries—particularly France—where intellectuals have been viewed to have assumed a more prominent position in a nation’s social and cultural aTairs. Collini divides his book into Wve sections. In the Wrst, he provides a detailed overview of the historical evolution beginning in the early nineteenth century of the term “intellectual” as a noun in the English language; Collini also argues that Absent Mindsz adopts the cultural sense—and not the sociological and subjective senses—of this term and focuses on leading thinkers “who deploy an acknowledged intellectual position or achievement in addressing a broader, nonspecialist public” (p. 47). The second and Wfth sections of Absent Minds document the vigorous debate that occurred during the twentieth century about the role of intellectuals in British society. In this period, Collini examines a number of case studies—from the pre-World War i journal New Agez to the bbc’s Third Programme—to demonstrate how the domestic claims of British exceptionalism became more prominent as the century progressed. Collini devotes the third part of his book to a discussion of the “absence thesis” within an international framework by examining the historical status of intellectuals in Europe and the United States. In many of these countries, Collini identiWes a strikingly similar attitude that viewed intellectuals as “z‘backward’, ‘marginalized’, or simply ‘absent’z” (p. 217). Collini notes that some of these attitudes were also in play even in France, although the role of intellectuals in French society was deWned almost exclusively in political terms after the Dreyfus ATair. The most interesting section of Absent Mindsz is the fourth, in which Collini September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 75 provides detailed biographical portraits of Wve prominent Britons who commented negatively about intellectuals or who refused to consider themselves members of a distinct intellectual elite. T.yS. Eliot is used as an example of the amateur social critic who viewed British intellectuals as being unworthy of claiming cultural authority. R.yG. Collingwood is characterized as an intellectual manqué whose professorial cackling was largely ineTective in inXuencing contemporaryopinion .Collini saves his sharpest rhetorical barbs for George Orwell, an “antique moralist” (p. 372) whose indiscriminate criticism of the left-wing intelligentsia was primarily responsible for negative public attitudes towards intellectuals in Britain in the middle of the twentieth century. A.yJ.yP. Taylor is portrayed as an intellectual gadXy who largely abandoned his professional historical vocation in favour of pursuing journalistic celebrity. Finally, the career of A.yJ. Ayer is analyzed to illustrate Ayer’s consistent refusal to espouse authoritative truths. Russell scholars will be somewhat surprised that Bertrand Russell is not featured more prominently in Absent Minds. With the exception of some isolated references scattered throughout his text, Collini devotes fewer than Wve pages of sustained analysis (pp. 120–4) to Russell’s often contradictory attitudes towards intellectuals after the First World War. Although Collini explicitly states that he will be “more than usually unmoved by readers or reviewers who complain that this or that important Wgure is absent from its pages” (p. 8), his decision to emphasize other British intellectuals at Russell’s expense is disappointing. Nonetheless , Russellians will Wnd much useful and...

On Fools and Clowns: Farewell to the GDR in Two Final DEFA Films: Egon Günther's Stein and Jörg Foth's Letztes aus der DaDaeR

A decade after the epochal political changes in East Germany, a number of important recent publications in Studies have centered on the question of intellectuals and their relationship to political power. East intellectuals and writers in particular had played a very public role in the protests leading to the fall of the wall and the chaotic developments afterwards. However, following the rapidly executed unification, the public indifferently dismissed these writers' dire warnings against the evils of capitalism. The former role models of dissent had now become dethroned-a process hastened by revelations about collaborations with the Stasi by several of the most prominent writers such as Christa Wolf, Heiner Muller, and Sascha Anderson. The early 1990s were characterized by several highly publicized debates about the true nature of literary dissent in the East, the uncomfortable proximity of Geist andMacht, and even the literary quality of the thus far esteemed canon of GDR writings (Gesinnungsasthetik). These debates, largely carried out in the feuilleton sections of Germany's important newspapers, broadened in the mid-1990s to include scrutiny of the public role of West intellectuals, but have returned recently to investigations into the question of political influence and engagement of East intellectuals, and their continued loyalty to some form of socialism as a realistic goal. Wolfgang Emmerich has summarized possible motives for this position: Vielen Angehorigen der literarischen Intelligenz [...] gelang - oder geschah - im Lauf der spaten 60er und 70er Jahre etwas ganz Erstaunliches: Auch als ihre Einstellung gegenuber dem real existierenden Sozialismus als dem falschen, misungenen kritischer und kritischer wurde, hielten sie - nachweislich ungebrochen auf der Basis eines emphatischen Bekenntnisses zum Antifaschismus - an der vertrauten Zuschreibung fest, einer Elite mit aufklarerisch-erzieherischem Auftrag anzugehoren. (Die Risiken des Dafurseins 280) Other scholars, too, have repeatedly emphasized the importance of the antifascist founding myth of the GDR, which became the long lasting ideological superstructure for legitimizing the socialist experiment, and produced what Annette Simon has called a Loyalitatsfalle(qtd. in Emmerich, German Writers 50) for its intellectuals-a litmus test for the right political conviction.1 As David Bathrick has shown, East writers were not only aware of this problem but articulated it as well in their literary works. Reading Christa Wolf's infamous 1990 story Was bleibt with an eye towards the writer's struggle to situate herself [...] in relation to a system within which she is both willing participant and an obj ect of ostracism, Bathrick concludes that the text seeks instead to confront the already internalized discursive 'system' as a functioning and invasive presence in the mental processes of this intellectual's everyday life (151). While much attention has been devoted to the role of literary intellectuals, less has been written about East filmmakers in this context. Two late DEFA films have explored the relationship of Geist and Macht even before the literary controversy broke lose by casting the central oppositional artist as fool and clown, respectively. This article discusses Egon Gunther's film Stein (1991) and Jorg Foth's Letztes aus der DaDaeR (1990), both of which were among the approximately thirty last features bearing the DEFA label. By choosing the fool's or clown's outsider perspective to comment on the lost Utopian project of socialism both films exhibit little faith in the effectiveness of art's pedagogical mission as Emmerich had described it for literary intellectuals. Gunther and Foth both demonstrate in their films a commitment to film as social critique even as they depict how this ambition was in effect thwarted early on in the GDR, leaving the artist the choice between playing the mad fool or the irreverent but ultimately harmless clown. …

IN PUBLIC, OR ELSEWHERE: STEFAN COLLINI ON INTELLECTUALS

The subject of Stefan Collini's Absent Minds is a “rich tradition of debate about the question of intellectuals” in twentieth-century Britain, in particular debate about “their absence or comparative insignificance” (1). The debate begins with the Dreyfus Affair and its unpredictable British reception (the queen, for example, was a believer in Dreyfus's innocence), simmers intriguingly through the 1920s and 1930s, and becomes positively effervescent in the 1950s, perhaps because of a new democratization of the public sphere. Collini is less interested in the possible historical causes than in the rhetorical structure that persists, swirling around figures as different as T. S. Eliot, R. G. Collingwood, George Orwell, A. J. P. Taylor, and A. J. Ayer, each of whom gets a full-length profile. Other chapters mix shorter profiles—for example, the devastatingly funny discussion of Colin Wilson and the authorities who briefly and embarrassingly made him a star in their firmament—with synthesis of the debate over intellectuals at different scales (for example, how it was shaped by particular periodicals and by the transition to electronic media) and in different national settings. Coming closer to the present, Collini admires Edward Said for what he did as an intellectual while disputing what he said about intellectuals—a celebration of rigorous exile from all social belonging, which could only leave the category of the intellectual looking almost totally uninhabited. The move turns out to be characteristic: it is as if Collini felt he could win a proper admiration for what intellectuals do only by rejecting most of their self-images, or evasion thereof.

Who Is Man? (review)

Reviewed by: Who Is Man? John C. Merkle Who Is Man? by Abraham J. Heschel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965. Like all of Heschel’s books but in a more concentrated and explicitly philosophical way, Who Is Man? is an eloquent defense of the transcendent dignity of being human—a transcendent dignity grounded in the human orientation toward and manifestation of meaning that transcends the human. Heschel has often been acclaimed as one of the most profound and poetic spiritual writers of our age. But he has not gained the recognition he deserves as a philosopher. This is probably due precisely to the poetic—rather than the strictly systematic—quality of his writing. But the fact that his writing is not systematic in the strict sense does not mean it is unsystematic. It is an organic system in that there is an order, direction, and inner consistency to it. In my view, Heschel’s books are every bit as philosophical as they are poetic, and this is especially true of Who Is Man? whose title states the question at the heart of Heschel’s philosophical exploration. “We ask: What is man? Yet the true question should be: Who is man? As a thing man is explicable; as a person he is both a mystery and a surprise” (p. 28). In responding to the question “Who is man?” Heschel engages in what he elsewhere calls “situational thinking” as contrasted with “conceptual thinking” (God In Search of Man, p. 5). The latter deals with concepts by way of detached [End Page 200] analysis; the former deals with situations by way of concerned involvement. By conceptual thinking Heschel does not simply mean thinking in concepts, which even situational thinking must include, but thinking about concepts rather than the situations underlying them. Situational thinking is the reverse, attending to the situations that give rise to the concepts. Conceptual thinking is an important way of dealing with many intellectual questions, but ultimate questions such as “Who is man?” are not merely intellectual issues but existential problems. Situational thinking is necessary when dealing with such problems: “No genuine problem comes into being out of sheer inquisitiveness. A problem is the outcome of a situation. . . . To understand the meaning of the problem and to appreciate its urgency, we must keep alive in our reflection the situation of stress and strain in which it comes to pass” (p. 1). It is easier to keep alive the conceptualization of a problem than the situation in which it emerged, and it is easier to spawn a conceptual problem than to grapple with a situational problem. But the conceptualization of a problem is not the problem itself and is often a distortion of it. “The predicament of much of contemporary philosophy is partly due to the fact that ongoing conceptualizations have so far outdistanced the situations which engender philosophizing that their conclusions seem to be unrelated to the original problems” (p. 2). Situational thinking focuses on “the human situation” (p. 14) and its original problems more than on concepts or speculations about human nature. Therefore, writes Heschel: “Our question is not only: What is the nature of the human species? but also: What is the situation of the human individual? What is human about a human being? Specifically, our theme is not only: What is a human being? but also: What is being human?” (pp. 28–29). For Heschel, any description of human existence that does not take into account human relatedness to transcendence is inadequate. But classical definitions of human beings as “tool-making animals,” “rational animals,” “political animals,” etc. fail to capture what is distinctive about human beings—“not the undeniable fact of [their] animality” but the enigma of what they do “with and apart from [their] animality” (p. 21). We can attain an adequate understanding of human existence only if we think in distinctively human terms and avoid categories developed in the study of other forms of life (p. 3). Thus any doctrine that describes human beings as qualified animals precludes a genuine understanding of human existence. “Man is a peculiar being trying to understand his uniqueness. What he seeks to understand is not his animality but...

Author's Response

In addressing the main points made by the five discussants, this response acknowledges possible failures of execution in the writing of Absent Minds. But it reaffirms the value of examining British traditions of debate about "the question of intellectuals" in analytical and comparative terms; it emphasizes that the figures and episodes discussed in some detail were not selected to be representative of political affiliations or of gender of any other identity apart from that of having made a significant or revealing contribution to the traditions being examined; and it maintains that a broadly literary-critical approach, partly deploying the terms of everyday discrimination and assessment, is a legitimate and central aspect of the work of the intellectual historian.

Stefan Collini, Virginia Woolf, and the Question of Intellectuals in Britain

This essay raises the question of gender in relation to the question of intellectuals in Britain, commenting on the gender blindness that made their exclusion so automatic in Collini's study. It looks at some women who might have been included, focussing particularly on Virginia Woolf as one who was not only a very significant public intellectual, but who in her essays entitled 'The Common Reader' also provided a definition and analysis of the role of an intellectual which is very different from that suggested by Collini. Rather than offering expert advice, Woolf sought to help readers to develop their own critical insights.

The Role of Intellectual Property Protection in the Business Strategy of University Spin-Off Biotech Companies in a Small Transition Economy

AbstractSpin-off biotech companies often have difficulties in creating competitive advantage through protection of their intellectual property, due to their limited human and financial resources. Having considered the value of the intellectual property and questions of enforceability, spin-off companies should use patenting only for inventions with a high market value and high patent enforceability; otherwise, publishing early or keeping the invention a trade secret should be preferred. This allows the inventor to benefit from operational freedom while maintaining low costs. The impact of the protected intellectual property on the success of the firm depends on its speed of entry into the market and when it reaches break-even point. In a transition country with a poorly developed entrepreneurial environment, patents may expire before the spin-off company has produced any profit from its expenditures on the protection of the intellectual property. It should also be remembered that their products may contain modules which are already protected by other inventors. Consequently, a strategically fundamental issue for the success of spin-off firms is the careful selection of the markets in which to operate, and the choice of the proper degree and method of intellectual property protection.

Strange directions for future research (cultural studies as creative writing)

The following three short pieces constitute policy interventions into my other disciplinary home, which is Australian cultural studies. I write and teach poetry, but otherwise am located there. As for the three texts, their aim is to open that discipline up to more creative research modalities, on the grounds that cultural studies should capitalise on its sometime role as the experimental wing of humanities and social sciences research, and make it central. While initially geared to a cultural studies audience, Ithink that these three interventions can be usefully read in dialogue with Jen Webb and Donna Lee Brien’s recent call in TEXT 10:1 for writing academics to contribute to the large and growing body of scholarship on the topics of creativity and innovation (Webb and Brien 2006). I fully concur with this strategy, though I’d like to put a little spin on it, as follows: I would like to see writing academics taking the current research imperative as an opportunity to address traditional intellectual questions, whether in cultural studies or elsewhere, precisely as writers; i.e., with the same sorts of freedoms and licences we allow ourselves in our creative work.

Inheritance Law and the Evolving Family. Ralph C. Brashier

Inheritance Law and the Evolving Family. Ralph C. Brashier. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2004. 264 pp. ISBN 1-59213-222-7. $24.95 (paper). This timely and important book breaks new ground. Ralph C. Brashier raises urgent questions about inheritance in the contemporary United States. He shows that probate frequently fails meet people's needs. Why? The nuclear remains the template for Grafting and executing probate even though data show that most Americans do not live in nuclear families but in greatly various forms. Today's families are made by multiplex alliances based on normative constructs of consanguinity (bilateral descent) and affinity (exogamous, monogamous, and heterosexual marriage) but also on many other identities. Today's Americans may be surrogate parents, single parents, or unmarried or married hetero- or homosexual parents who have no children, biological children, adopted children, stepchildren, technologically assisted children, or some combination thereof. In a brave new of empirical form, the incongruity between inheritance and citizens' needs raises urgent practical, legal, humanistic, and intellectual questions about the institution of family in a world capitalist economy. What constitutes legitimate descent, marriage, or family? What legal rights and responsibilities do those persons have? What is each state's responsibility the families that people actually have? What laws are needed protect members? What is good for the country? What is good for humanity? Brashier convincingly demonstrates that what members expect and desire concerning property transmission and guardianship is often at odds with what the state prescribes. Even normative families are subject surprising legal singularities. In Georgia, for example, a surviving spouse has no statutory recourse against (p. 38). Louisiana, replete with legal precepts derived from Roman Law or continental code law, is the only state in the union order that young children receive a forced share (legitime) to protect them from parental disinheritance (p. 118). In many respects, this book disturbs while it informs because occupationdriven, geographically mobile American families are unlikely know how a last will and testament will be interpreted-and actualized-under different state laws. Chapter 1 establishes the preferred position in probate law (p. 11) of the American spouse, who receives greater protection in inheritance schemes than any other member (p. 10). Spouses in states with community-property laws have equal interest in the various assets earned by either during the (p. 38) that cannot be lost due a provision in the will of the first die. In separate-property states using elective-share law, however, spousal assets are considered individually. The Uniform Probate Code (UPC) of 1969 attempted unify elective-share by ruling that one third of a decedent's augmented estate must be given the surviving spouse, who is assumed by the be an economic dependent (p. 19). The 1990 code recognizes the need for the support component of marriage but also conceptualizes spouses as economic partners. Inheritance is thus based on an evaluation of the length of the marriage and the cumulative wealth of both spouses when the first spouse dies. …

Can we Develop Neurally Acting Drugs for the Treatment of Migraine?

Serotonin (5-HT)(1B/1D) receptor agonists, which are also known as triptans, represent the most important advance in migraine therapeutics in the four millennia that the condition has been recognized. The vasoconstrictive activity of triptans produced a small clinical penalty in terms of coronary vasoconstriction but also raised an enormous intellectual question: to what extent is migraine a vascular problem? Functional neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies have consistently developed the theme of migraine as a brain disorder and, therefore, demanded that the search for neurally acting antimigraine drugs should be undertaken. The prospect of non-vasoconstrictor acute migraine therapies, potential targets for which are discussed here, offers a real opportunity to patients and provides a therapeutic rationale that places migraine firmly in the brain as a neurological problem, where it undoubtedly belongs.

Networks Actual and Potential: Think Tanks, War Games and the Creation of Contemporary American Politics

Networks Actual and Potential: Think Tanks, War Games and the Creation of Contemporary American Politics Richard Baxstrom (bio), Naveeda Khan (bio), Deborah Poole (bio), and Bhrigupati Singh (bio) The months leading up to the U.S. incursion into Iraq in 2003 witnessed one of the largest protest movements in world history, unprecedented in its international scope, with rallies being held simultaneously in over forty countries across four continents. Even as the protests were building momentum, a group of us from Johns Hopkins University, peripherally involved with the anti-war movement, began to feel a different kind of anxiety.1 What would be the future orientation of this movement once the invasion began and the initial momentum of the protests began to subside? Would it be simply to re-iterate that Bush is, and had been, unusually stupid? Beyond a point there seemed nothing particularly radical about that. And, despite our continued participation in the movement, we were equally worried by the intellectual and moral certainties of the anti-war rhetoric, which left very little room for future (anticipatory?) thought except to demand punitive or reparative action a posteriori and to await the next crisis. The present, it seems, had fallen out of our grasp. How did such a situation emerge? At the same time within the United States, as in several parts of the world, the problem of Homeland Security has come to be surrounded by a distinctive sense of panic, which we ourselves came to feel at various moments. News of the deteriorating situations in Afghanistan and in Iraq are accompanied by reports of the “largest Executive Branch transformation in half a century with the Department of Homeland Security” in the United States. 2 “The state of emergency has now become the rule rather than the exception.” We hear this claim across the entire political spectrum, in progressive journals of social theory and philosophy, conservative manuals of public policy, government legislations, activist reports, and op-ed pieces, although each may attribute the cause of this apparent shift to a different source. Such a claim is repeatedly, urgently mobilized with the body politic being trained to embody the currently endorsed level of anxiety in yellow, orange and red. Within such an atmosphere, of certainty conjoined with panic, what constitutes a radical perspective? What tasks might radical scholarship set for itself? Words such as Democracy, Justice, Freedom, and Revolution have been used so often, by so many people, first and foremost by the Bush administration, that it would be completely disabling if the only work left to do were to adjudicate their “correct” or “truthful” application. Finding ourselves at a loss, as a first step we felt it crucial to address that which lay closest to us, which, given our location within the academy, meant returning to the question of intellectuals and power, or the intellectual life of power, in all its specificity, within the American context. With such an inquiry in mind we began to investigate the set of networks and institutions known as think tanks, seemingly the most crucial intellectual node in what is commonly known as the military-industrial complex. Having set ourselves this task, the question arises: hasn’t such an inquiry been undertaken several times before? Indeed, all the empirical material for this argument, including think tank reports and self-descriptions, government documents and news archives, are publicly available, often less than a click away on the Internet. And there is no lack within existing social science literature or, more recently, on activist listservs of detailed descriptions of think tanks, of their politically implicated histories, and the neo-conservative takeover of American politics. Although motivated by many of these same concerns, our essay enters this terrain of inquiry at a slightly different angle of participation. We might present our mode of engagement as follows: In 1993, immediately after his tenure as Secretary of Defense in the administration of George Bush (Sr.), the current Vice-President Richard Cheney joined the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank closely linked to the Republican Party since the time of the Reagan administration. Cheney then left the AEI in 1995 to become the Chairman of the Halliburton Company. Recently, under...

Secret Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Benardo Benes, and Cuban Miami

Secret Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Benardo Benes, and Cuban Miami

Reply

We are writing in response to a letter written by Dr George Tysowsky at Ivoclar Vivadent, Inc, to you at The Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry in reference to our recently published article, “In Vitro Cytotoxicity Of Traditional Versus Contemporary Dental Ceramics” (J Prosthet Dent 2003;90:452-8). In that letter, Dr Tysowsky expressed his “strong” disagreement with our conclusions about one lithium-disilicate material, IPS Empress 2, that we tested. In particular, Dr Tysowsky claimed that “it is inappropriate to make a definitive conclusion on biocompatibility on the basis of a single screening evaluation,” in reference to the in vitro method we used to evaluate various ceramic materials in cell culture. We make several points in response to this letter. First, contrary to Dr Tysowsky's claim, we did not conclude that Empress 2 had poor biocompatibility. Our conclusion was that “[Empress 2] exhibited cytotoxicity that would not be deemed biologically acceptable on the basis of prevailing empirical standards for dental alloys and composites.” We stand by this conclusion, which is strongly supported by the data presented in the article. The Empress 2 product was markedly cytotoxic initially, but improved with time. On an aggressive perturbation of the surface, the cytotoxicity was evident again. In a screening test such as ours, this marked cytotoxicity would be the basis for termination of development of a new product, or at least very close scrutiny. In the development of new products, given a choice between the cytotoxicity exhibited by this material and lower cytotoxicity of other nascent materials, most manufacturers would proceed with the less cytotoxic material. This is our experience, and the data support our conclusion. We acknowledge that we used an in vitro test, for which we have no apologies, because these types of tests are currently the best, first evaluation of new materials. Dr Tysowsky also emphasized that the Empress 2 product has been evaluated by independent toxicologic laboratories and clinical trails. Although we are not able to view these data, we acknowledge their existence, and we do not imply that Empress 2 was not biologically evaluated before marketing. We cannot explain any differences between these other tests and ours because, to our knowledge, these other data have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The methods we used (which we stand by) are published in our article for scientific scrutiny. We encourage the publication of all biologic data on materials to further intellectual discussion and improvement of in vitro biocompatibility testing methods. The results of our in vitro study are “after-the-fact” in that we applied our in vitro test to materials that are either on the market or under consideration for the market. The selection of these materials helps provide a relevance to our work. The cytotoxicity of Empress 2 in our methods may indeed be contrary to known clinical experience. This type of paradox is well known in the biocompatibility field. These “disagreements” of data do not imply that in vitro tests are wrong, nor that the clinical studies are correct. In our eyes, they provide an opportunity to ask intellectual questions that will further our understanding of the biologic response to materials. It may be, for example, that more subtle biologic effects of a material are discovered in in vitro testing that are not discernable in clinical trials. In vitro tests such as ours may point out new areas for scrutiny in future clinical trials. Finally, we do not contest the “biologic safety” of Empress 2, and we are sure that Ivoclar Vivadent has tested this material for biologic safety. However, we also believe that every material deserves continuing scrutiny for all properties, including biologic effects. It is our job to provide this scrutiny. Dr Tysowsky points out in his letter that “it is inappropriate to make a definitive conclusion on biocompatibility based on a single screening evaluation.” We would amend this idea to say that it is also inappropriate to assume that once a material has passed current regulatory tests, additional assessments of its biologic effects are not necessary. Our study showed some dramatic biologic differences between Empress 2 and other ceramic materials. Our results clearly demonstrate the need to assess the biologic properties of new materials, including ceramics, and that ceramics are not all the same biologically any more than they are all the same in transverse strength. We stand by our tests, and we hope to discover the mechanisms responsible for these differences in future studies. We thank The Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry for allowing us to respond, and we thank Dr Tysowsky for his interest and his comments. We are grateful for the dialogue.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessRegarding the Pain of OthersMaxine Harris, Ph.D.Maxine HarrisSearch for more papers by this author, Ph.D.Published Online:1 Mar 2004https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.55.3.326-aAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail In Regarding the Pain of Others, author Susan Sontag raises the compelling moral and intellectual question, What role do images of war and human suffering play in shaping our response to the pain of others? Do we become numbed to the pain as we watch the succession of images that scroll across the screen as we watch the evening news? Or do the images arouse in us a sense of compassion that leads—or at least has the possibility to lead—to constructive actions? Sontag's deep understanding of the photographer's art and reality serves as the backdrop for her discussion and the debate she invites the reader to join.Even those of us who are not students of photographic art will find much to consider in this short and thoughtful essay. The role of the witness has significance for any clinician who works with men and women who have survived abuse or profound loss and trauma. And although the survivor rarely has a photographic account of the trauma, he or she often has a verbal or written record of lived pain and suffering. For many survivors of abuse, being able to tell one's story to a compassionate witness is often the beginning of the recovery process.Sontag questions whether too many images of suffering will inure the viewer to the pain of others. Although this may be a risk for the reader leafing through a magazine and scanning pictures of war atrocities, it seems less likely to be the case when the witness is a clinician listening to the stories of trauma survivors. First, and most important, the clinician-witness has a relationship with the survivor who sits opposite him or her in the interview room. The survivor is not an anonymous other but a real person with a deeply personal story. What is stirred in the clinician is not indifference but, rather, what the Dalai Lama calls compassion, a desire to relieve the suffering of others. So stirring and profound can the effect on the clinician be that some have rightly raised questions about the vicarious traumatization that many clinicians experience just by the act of bearing witness.Sontag legitimately points out that the purpose of some images is to shock the viewer, to disturb the complacency and obliviousness that characterizes much of the modern response to tragedy. And although some trauma survivors may tell their stories with an eye to the shock value of the tale, most do not. Instead, the survivor tells the story in order to be heard and seen, to relieve some of the intense isolation and madness that surrounds the experience of abuse. The survivor wants to reach out and make contact with a person who might be able to understand and witness the pain. Sometimes the account results in action taken by the witness, but sometimes it merely builds a bridge out of loneliness and despair.Perhaps the fundamental difference between the images that Sontag describes and the stories of abuse that many clinicians hear and witness is that Sontag's images are not the product of the victim-survivors themselves but are the work of a third eye, a photographer who is telling someone else's story. When clinicians listen to the accounts of pain and suffering that trauma survivors bring into the consulting room, the clinic, or the hospital, they are witnessing the firsthand account of one who has lived through suffering, and that account can do nothing but arouse compassion and, hopefully, a desire to help.Dr. Harris is chief executive officer for clinical affairs at Community Connections in Washington, D.C., and author of The Twenty-Four Carat Buddha and Other Fables: Stories of Self-Discovery.by Susan Sontag; New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, 126 pages, $20 FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 55Issue 3 March 2004Pages 326-a-327 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 March 2004 Published in print 1 March 2004

Scholarship Unbound: Assessing Service as Scholarship for Promotion and Tenure (review)

Reviewed by: Scholarship Unbound: Assessing Service as Scholarship for Promotion and Tenure Carol L. Colbeck Scholarship Unbound: Assessing Service as Scholarship for Promotion and Tenure by Kerry Ann O'Meara. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002. 256 pp. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 0-4159-3223-8. "Scholarship" is often used in academic parlance recently, particularly when modified by a participle. Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff (1997), for example, reviewed how to "assess" scholarship after it was "reconsidered" by Boyer (1990). Similarly, Kerry Ann O'Meara attempted to "unbound" and "unwrap" scholarship in her dissertation, published in 2002 as part of the RoutledgeFalmer Series in Higher Education. While O'Meara did not directly address what it means to bound or wrap scholarship, the focus of her book, Scholarship Unbound: Assessing Service as Scholarship for Promotion and Tenure, indicated that unbounding might occur to the extent that faculty members' professional service activities are perceived as significant and valuable contributions to their scholarly productivity. O'Meara unwrapped service scholarship in Chapter 2 when she distinguished it from university committee work and disciplinary citizenship, and when she decried institutional drift towards rewarding faculty more for publication than for service or teaching. Because reconsidering, assessing, and unbounding scholarship are "messy business," O'Meara used case study methods to explore how "people, policies, and decisions fall together" (p. 2) in four colleges of education selected as exemplars for using Boyer's reconsidered definition of scholarship for evaluating faculty work for promotion and tenure. Mid-West State and Patrick State Universities, and St. Timothy and Erin Colleges (all pseudonyms) modified their promotion and tenure criteria at various times during the early 1990s, reacting against a prevailing "research culture" and in response to Boyer's (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered. O'Meara's case studies of the programs (Chapters 3 through 6) detailed institution and education program characteristics, the impetus for and process of change in faculty evaluation procedures, and responses to the changes by promotion and tenure committee members and by tenure- and/or promotion-seeking faculty. Comparing cases in Chapter 7, O'Meara found that key administrators and faculty members on each campus were inspired by Boyer (1990) to make promotion and tenure criteria more consistent with the range of work actually conducted by faculty. The norms of research culture influenced evaluation of service as scholarship by promotion and tenure committees in all four cases. Committee members wanted to see evidence of original and creative contribution to disciplinary knowledge, peer and/or client review, demonstrated effectiveness, and broad dissemination. Faculty members' service activities were less likely to enhance their cases for promotion or tenure when their dossiers described their relation-building activities with clients rather than how their analyses addressed intellectual questions. O'Meara reported that changed guidelines were most helpful when they provided service-oriented faculty with clear information about how to emphasize the scholarly nature of their service activities. In addition, O'Meara asserted that the service culture was strengthened [End Page 481] because Mid-West and Patrick State Universities secured more external funding for service as scholarship, their administrators and faculty gave presentations and published articles about their changed faculty evaluation procedures, and because reward policies were more consistent with campus rhetoric about service at all four institutions. Chapter 8 drew on the case study and cross-case descriptions to offer suggestions for "designing cultures that reward service as scholarship." Although case study descriptions were strengths of the book, a key shortcoming was evident in the conclusion. Just as O'Meara reported that "committees complained that the [P & T] portfolios had descriptive rather than analytical accounts," (p. 167), the conclusion lacked the theoretical analysis that might enhance the ability of practitioners and researchers to make more effective use of her rich case descriptions. One place to start would be a more specific analytic definition of culture and its key components that should be considered for the purpose of understanding the impact of institutional policy change. O'Meara introduced the idea of "culture" as a unifying influence in a very short (p. 5) conceptual framework for the case studies, but immediately implied that academic and disciplinary subcultures might hinder unity. Each case has a section on "culture" that includes...

Allegories of Nation? A Reading of José Cardoso Pires's Novel "O Delfim"

Allegories ofNation?A ReadingofJoséCardoso Pires's NovelO Delfini ANTONIO SOUSA RIBEIRO Thedefinition ofnationas an 'imagined community'1 andtherecognition thatnationalculturesconstitute 'a discursive devicewhichrepresents difference as unity oridentity' havebecomeinrecent years a widely shared presupposition of criticaldiscourse,indeeda vital componentof the present common senseincultural studies.2 Formulations suchas thesehelp todrawourattention tothesimple factthatnationalidentity isnotjusta matter ofcontent, butalso,decisively, a matter ofform - notso mucha question oftradition, butoftranslation andofinvention. Notsurprisingly, the conceptof the borderor the boundaryis becomingincreasingly prominent incultural studies, as itpermits one to graspthestrategies of distinction andofarticulation thatspecifically constitute a given culture theproduction ofitsownborders beinganessential component oftheselfdefinition ofanyculture. The dramatically increasing pressures ofglobalization havelenta new centrality tothenotion ofnational culture andofcultural identity, whileat thesametimerendering themproblematic. In fact, ina globalizedworld system, culturalidentity becomesinstrumental forthenegotiation of a nationalstate'sposition within thatsystem. The consequences ofsuchan instrumentalization are obvious:witness, forinstance, how thepositive connotations of multiculturalism are being increasingly eroded by a reinterpretation ofthisnotionas a signofinsurmountable difference orof essential incompatibility, or,worsestill, bya foundation ofthe'originality' and 'authenticity' ofa givenculture on ethnicterms. As another case in point,SamuelHuntington's modelofthe'clashofcivilizations'3 is inthe endbutoneversion ofan 'insanity ofidentity' intent on investing cultural difference withsomeessentialist meaning.4 Atthesametime, however, thecontext ofa globalized world,involving 'interactions ofa neworderandintensity', destabilizes thevery notionof localidentity.5 Itbecomesapparent thata definition ofthelocalcan only 1Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities.Reflectionson the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,revisededn (London/NewYork:Verso,1991). StuartHall, 'The QuestionofCulturalidentity', inModernity and ItsFutures, ed. bySt Hall etal. (London:Polity,1992),d. 297. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizationsand theRemakingof WorldOrder (New York:Simon& Schuster, 1996). Thomas Meyer, Identitäts-Wahn. Die Politisierungdes kulturellenUnterschieds(Berlin: Aufbau,1997). 5 ArjunÄppadurai,Modernityat Large. CulturalDimensionsof Globalization (Minneapolis/ London:University ofMinnesotaPress,1996),p. 27. 164 ANTONIO SOUSA RIBEIRO beachieved through a reflection onitsrelation totheglobal,without which the conceptitselfis unthinkable. Indeed, both conceptsare strictly interdependent: thedefinition ofcertain cultural formations as localisthe waya dominant cultural discourse can claima globalstatusforitself thusconcealing thefactthattheglobalisinturn nothing elsethana local formation that hassucceeded inachieving hegemony andintheprocess has gainedpossession ofthepowerto define, thatis to provideitsown code with themark ofuniversality. Under thislight, theillusion ofhomogeneity conveyed bythepanorama ofcontemporary culture can be uncovered as whatit reallyis: a fiction through whichhegemonic globalizationconcealsthosedifferences and unequalpowerrelations whichitisthetaskofa counter-hegemonic logic toexpose.Asa matter offact, globalization isthecodewordfora process whichis not uniform but highlyheterogeneous. As ArjunAppadurai reminds us,'thenewglobalcultural economy hastobeseenas a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order'.6In thiscontext, it has in turnbecome easierto discardanyessentialist assumptions from thenotionofcultural identity and to recognizeit as a contestedterrain, preyto internal contradictions andtheobjectofa permanent negotiation between different and oftenconflicting positions.Identity turnsout to be some kindof floating signifier, requiring careful contextualization anda specific integrationina dynamic, relational framework. Within sucha framework, itisclearthata notionofagency cannotbe dispensed with.Itiscrucialtoaskabouttheinstances ofmediation andit cannot, therefore, comeas a surprise thatthewholediscussion aboutthe changing contemporary conditions ofcultural production, accommodated undertherather awkwardlabelofpostmodernism, has brought abouta renewedinterest in the questionof intellectuals - rangingfromthe straightforward proclamationof theirfinaldemise,as in Lyotard's obituary, to the variouspositionsfavouring the hypothesis that the proclaimed deadareafter allaliveandwell.7 I hopethesefewremarks willhavehelpedto setthestageforthebrief discussion ofsomecentral problems connected withthequestionofthe literary representation ofthenationI proposetoengagewithhere.Indeed, onecannotaddress thisquestion without acknowledging thatthe'imagining 'ofthenationhaslongbeentaking placeina context over-determined bythetensions between thelocalandtheglobalI roughly outlined above. It is againstthisbackground thattheadequacyofcompeting modelsof interpretation has to be tested.That is whyI shall startwithsome 6 Appadurai,p. 32. 7 Jean-François Lyotard,Tombeau de l'intellectuel', inJ.-F.Lyotard,Tombeaude l'intellectuel etautrespapiers(Paris:Galilée,1984),pp. 9-22. ALLEGORIES OF NATION? 165 comments on theargument presented byFredric Jamesonin his article ThirdWorld Literature intheEraofMultinational Capitalism', published in1986inthejournalSocialText,before proceeding toa reflection onthe Portuguese case,centred ona rereading ofa keytextofmodern Portuguese literature, thenovelO Delfim byJoséCardosoPires. Jameson's textrestson assumptions thatareofvitalimportance fora discussion ofcultural identity, starting withhisinsistence on theneedfor comparative cultural studies basedon a relational wayofthinking world culture and on thesignificance ofperipheral cultures and non-canonical texts forsuchstudies. The courseofhisargument leadshim,however, to highly problematic conclusions thatseemto meextremely instructive in regard tothecentral questions I amaddressing. The mainaxis ofJameson's argument restson thenotionofnational allegory as thedistinctive feature of'third worldliterature': Third-world texts[. . .] necessarily projecta politicaldimension intheform ofnational allegory:the storyof the privateindividualdestinyis always an allegoryof the embattled situationofthepublicthird-world culture and society} And again, towards the end of the essay, in a central passage that has to be quoted at some length: The viewfromthetop is epistemologically crippling...