Plato’s Medicalisation of Ethics

Apeiron ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Torres
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Scientific Model ◽  
Medicine And Philosophy ◽  
Methodological Status ◽  
Medical Concepts

AbstractI argue for the view that the scientific model which Plato consistently had in mind when sharpening his main ethical theory was medicine. Moreover, I ascribe to Plato a “medical model of ethics”. A careful examination of this model reveals how Plato appropriates several medical concepts and ideas by employing two central methodological devices in his thought: dialectical transposition and analogical characterisation. In discussing them, I identify different kinds of medical references in the dialogues –not all medical references in Plato have the same methodological status– and draw greater attention to the most recurrent medical analogies in them. More generally, the paper is also meant to provide a case study of the complex relationship between medicine and philosophy in Antiquity by examining in a new light the various ways in which the former served as an epistemological and ethical model for the latter.

scholarly journals Does Tenure Security Reduce Disaster Risk? A Comparative Study of the Nairobi Settlements of Kibera and Kawangware

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rónán McDermott ◽  
Pat Gibbons ◽  
Dalmas Ochieng ◽  
Charles Owuor Olungah ◽  
Desire Mpanje
Keyword(s):  
Structural Integrity ◽  
Disaster Risk ◽  
Comparative Case Study ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Tenure Security ◽  
Household Level ◽  
Urban Informal Settlements ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractWhile scholarship suggests that improving tenure security and housing significantly reduces disaster risk at the household level within urban settings, this assertion has not been adequately tested. Tenure security can be conceived as being composed of three interrelated and overlapping forms: tenure security as determined by legal systems; de facto tenure security; and tenure security as perceived by residents. This article traces the relationship between tenure security, the quality of housing, and disaster risk on the basis of a mixed methods comparative case study of the settlements of Kawangware and Kibera in Nairobi. Although the findings suggest that owner-occupancy is associated with the structural integrity of dwellings to a greater extent than tenantship, no association was found between the length of occupancy by households and the structural integrity of the dwelling. Moreover, tenantship is not found to be closely associated with fires and flooding affecting the dwelling as extant scholarship would suggest. Formal ownership is linked with greater investment and upgrading of property with significant implications for disaster risk. Our findings highlight the complex relationship between tenure security and disaster risk in urban informal settlements and provide impetus for further investigation.

Unemployment in the Affective Economy: Exploring the Affective Governing of Young Unemployed People in the Danish Welfare State

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-361
Author(s):  
Sabina Pultz
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Field Observations ◽  
Unemployed People ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Governmentality Studies ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Unemployed ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract This case study investigates the affective governing of young unemployed people, and it concludes that getting money in the Danish welfare state comes with an “affective price”. In the quest for a job, unemployed people have been increasingly responsibilized in order to live up to the ideal of the active jobseeker. Consequently, when faced with unemployment, they are encouraged to work harder on themselves and their motivation. Based on an interview study with young unemployed people (N=39) and field observations made at employment fund agencies in Denmark (2014–15), I explore how young unemployed people are governed by and through their emotions. By supplementing governmentality studies (Foucault et al. 1988, 2010) with the concept of “affective economy” from Ahmed (2014), I discuss how young unemployed people who receive money from the Danish state are placed in a situation of debt. The paper unfolds how this debt becomes visible as the unemployed people often describe feeling under suspicion for not doing enough, for not being motivated enough. Through an abundance of (pro) activity, they have to prove the suspicion of being lazy wrong, and through managing themselves as active jobseekers, they earn the right to get money from the state. Here motivation, passion and empowerment are key currencies. I discuss the intricate interplay between monetary and affective currencies as well as political implications in the context of the Danish welfare. The article contributes by making visible the importance of taking affective matters into account when investigating the complex relationship between politics and psychology.

scholarly journals “Attractive to Strangers and Instructive to Students.” The McCullochs’ 19th Century Bird Collection in Dalhousie College

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-108
Author(s):  
Eric L. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Hybrid Origin ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Great Caution ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Thomas Mcculloch

Thomas McCulloch, Presbyterian minister and educator, founder of Pictou Academy, first President of Dalhousie College 1838-1843, established a museum in Pictou, NS, by 1828, including a bird collection. To McCulloch, the order of the natural world instilled in students principles of a liberal education and a model of society. His first collections were sold, but when McCulloch came to Dalhousie in 1838 he started a new collection, hoping to make it the basis of a provincial museum. In this he was aided by his son Thomas, who had been trained as a taxidermist. The younger McCulloch kept and expanded the collection until his death, after which it passed to Dalhousie College. The current McCulloch Collection, mainly the work of Thomas McCulloch junior, seems to exemplify purposes and practices of 19th century natural history. But research shows that the collection has a hybrid origin and must be viewed with great caution as an historical artifact. This is a case study in the difficulty of interpreting 19th century natural history collections without careful examination of their history.

Disability and Biomediation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mack Hagood
Keyword(s):  
Medical Model ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Medical Model Of Disability

The medical mediation of bodily differences can be fraught, and many scholars have shown how the combination of media and medicine can produce disablement according to biopolitical norms. Mack Hagood proposes a framework for the study of biomediation that disentangles medical uses of media technologies from the medical model of disability. Using tinnitus as his case study, he demonstrates the value of this framework for understanding the complex role of media in both biological and political struggles over disability and disabled identities.

Inequality and crime in Latin America

2020 ◽  
pp. 713-745
Author(s):  
Catalina Droppelmann Roepke ◽  
Nicolás Trajtenberg
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Income Inequality ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Socio Economic Status

In the field of criminology social inequality has long been theorized to be associated with crime. This issue has been extensively studied and empirical research has shown that income inequality and low socio-economic status are positively associated with crime perpetration and victimization. Latin America constitutes a particularly interesting case study to analyse the association between crime and inequality. Simultaneously, it is considered to be one of the most unequal and violent regions on the planet. Therefore, it might be tempting to conclude that inequality must play a major role in the explanation of this region’s high levels of crime and violence. While this possibility cannot be rejected, the overall goals of this chapter are to analyse and discuss this complex relationship, focusing not only on how inequality might explain crime and violence, but also on how criminal justice institutions stigmatize, label, and reproduce social inequalities and social exclusion.

What are the Challenges for Evaluating a Palliative Care Service?

2005 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Kate Senior ◽  
David Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Palliative Care ◽  
Care Service ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
Palliative Care Service ◽  
Respondent Burden ◽  
Evaluation Approaches ◽  
The Impact

This paper identifies the challenges in researching the impact of a rural palliative care service on its patients, carers and providers in the context of the National Palliative Care Strategy. It describes the use of an anthropological method to overcome problems of acceptability and respondent burden and to enable the elaboration of meaning and valuation by participants. It uses the Griffith Area Palliative Care Service as a case study to illustrate the problems of such research and the value of the anthropological method over more conventional research and evaluation approaches. It makes recommendations about how to assess the outcomes of services such as palliative care where the focus of care is complex, individual and family, and the outcomes go far beyond what can be measured with the medical model.

Ethics in Foreign Policy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Bulley
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Relational Ethics ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Policy Context ◽  
Ethical Norms ◽  
Policy Arena ◽  
The Way

Ethics and foreign policy have long been considered different arenas, which can only be bridged with great analytical and practical difficulty. However, with the rise of post-positivist approaches to foreign policy, much greater attention has been paid to the way that ethical norms and moral values are embedded within the way states understand their own actions and interests, both enabling and constraining their behavior. Turning to these approaches raises a different question to whether ethics and foreign policy can mix, that of how best to understand, analyze, and critique the role that ethics inevitably play within foreign policy making? What are required are perspectives which, instead of constructing an ethical theory in the abstract and applying it to a concrete situation, start from the ethics of the foreign policy arena itself. Two ways of looking at ethics are especially useful in this regard: a virtue-ethics approach and a relational-ethics approach. These can be best explored by observing how they work in a particular foreign policy context, such as the highly controversial U.K. decision to join the invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003. This was a policy where ethics came particularly to the fore in both the decision-making process and its justification. The case study can therefore help show the types of questions virtue and relational ethics ask, the way they work as analytical and critical frameworks, and the problems they raise for the role of ethics in foreign policy. They also point toward important future directions for research in the area.

Beyond the ICF: Italian network strategies for job placement of persons with disabilities

Modern Italy ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Corbisiero
Keyword(s):  
Medical Model ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
World Health ◽  
International Classification Of Functioning ◽  
Disability And Health ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
Attitudinal Barriers ◽  
Italian Legislation

The Second National Conference on Disability, held in Bari in 2003, took the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), adopted by all WHO member states in 2001, as its frame of reference for future action and policies on disability. The ICF broke decisively with the medical model by seeing disability as an interaction between a biological and psychological condition and environmental and attitudinal barriers. Although existing Italian legislation on access to work for persons with disabilities, particularly Law 68/1999 on ‘collocamento mirato’ (targeted placement), anticipated some of the principles and definitions of the ICF, its implementation in practice was often snared in complex bureaucratic procedures and compromised by narrowly medical assessments of impairment and by considerable variations in standard from region to region. In 2009–2011 a pilot project, Progetto ICF4, was launched in 11 regions of Italy. It applied ICF principles, using Social Network Analysis (SNA) to assess the suitability of a work environment in terms of the networks of relations between the different actors involved in it. The way this has functioned in practice is illustrated by a case study of Teramo, one of the provinces in the pilot.

A Case Report on Wernicke–Korsakoff Syndrome

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Yogesh Jagannath Pokale ◽  
Sunil G. Gupte
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Use ◽  
Clinical Presentation ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
Cortical Atrophy ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Treatment And Prevention ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
Korsakoff Syndrome

<strong>Background:</strong> Alcohol use is one of the most serious problems in public health and the Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome is one of the gravest consequences of alcoholism. Post-mortem studies suggest that Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome occurs in 12.5% of dependent drinkers and in 2% of the general population. Korsakoff Syndrome is an amnestic disorder generally followed by untreated Wernicke's Encephalopathy. Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome is most commonly a post-mortem diagnosis. <strong>Aim and Objective:</strong> To report a case of Korsakoff Syndrome since the clinical presentation is often undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. <strong>Case description:</strong> 50 year old male, drinking heavily since 25 years presented with complaints of forgetfulness, talking irrelevantly since last 18 months. Patient developed symptoms of confusion, ataxia, and altered behaviour 2 years back, for which he was treated as a case of encephalitis and not treated with thiamine. He later progressed to show symptoms of amnesia. On examination, patient showed recent memory deficit with anterograde and variable retrograde amnesia with confabulations. Neurological examination revealed absent deep tendon reflexes and signs of peripheral neuropathy. MRI brain showed global cortical atrophy. The sequence of events in this case study demonstrates the possible effects of long term alcohol use, namely Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome. Highlights of the medical model of Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome will be subsequently presented. Lastly, suggestions for treatment and prevention of further damage will be discussed.

John IX Patriarch of Jerusalem in exile

2016 ◽  
Vol 109 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Foteini Spingou
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
John Of Damascus ◽  
Holy Man

AbstractA series of seven epigrams from the Anthologia Marciana (MS Marc. gr. 524) sheds light on the life of John IX Merkouropoulos, patriarch of Jerusalem in exile (1157-before 1166). The evidence that comes to light reveals traces of a monastic network connecting Jerusalem with Constantinople. According to the epigrams, John became a monk at Mar Saba - something further evinced by the double vita of St John of Damascus and Kosmas of Maiouma that he composed [BHG 395]. After staying at the Koutsovendis monastery, he travelled to Constantinople, where Manuel I appointed him on the patriarchal see and also made him abbot of the monastery of St Diomedes/New Zion in Constantinople. Shortly before or after John’s departure from life, his disciple, the monk Clement, attempted to manifest that his spiritual father was a holy man. Thus, Clement had John’s portrait placed next to that of St James, the brother of God. John’s complex relationship with the Syropalestinian monastic tradition make his life and the survival of his memory an exceprional case study for understanduing the phenomenon of Holy Men in twelfth-century Constantinople.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document